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^Imerican  CommontDealt!)^ 


NEW   HAMPSHIRE 


American  CommontDealtf)^ 


NEW  HAMPSHIRE 


AN  EPITOME  OF    POPULAR  GOVERNMENT 


FRANK  B.  SANBORN 


V     HENRY  VON  VVAOKERBARTHJ 

BOSTON  AND  NEW  YORK 

HOUGHTON,  MIFFLIN  AND  COMPANY 

^fte  iRiberjsiDe  prcsjs,  Cambridge 

1904 


15^?i)8 


COPYRIGHT   1904  BY  FRANK   B.  SANBORN 
ALL   RIGHTS   RESERVED 

Published  April,  IQ04 


;-\^ 


PREFACE 

In  rewriting  the  story  of  early  New  Hampshire,  so 
imperfectly  told  by  its  first  and  best  historian,  Dr. 
Belknap,  the  founder  of  the  Massachusetts  Histor- 
ical Society,  an  effort  has  been  made  to  supply  those 
facts  which  Belknap,  of  necessity,  could  not  know, 
-because  the  Engflish  archives  had  not  then   been 
'  opened,  except  partially  to  the  inveterate  Chalmers, 
(^  who  hated  the  Colonies,  and  was  mortified  at  their 
^/- independence.  It  has  also  seemed  needful  to  correct 
^the  slight  bias  of  Belknap  in  favor  of  his  native 

'  Massachusetts  and  the  Puritan  order  of  ministers 

o 

*^to  which  he  professionally  belonged,  though  free 
,from  their  worst  presuppositions.    In  doing  this, 
oiuW  and  grateful  acknowledgment  is  made  for  the 
^invaluable  aid  of  Belknaj),  in  all  those  directions 
where  his  ceaseless  diligence  and  his  gentle  temper 
gave  him  a  clear  view  of  the  facts,  and  the  bearing 
of  the  events  and  tendencies  illustrated   by  him. 
•    Without  his  preliminary  labors  and  the  acute  addi- 
tions and  corrections  of  John  Farmer,  another  Mas- 
sachusetts historian  domiciled  in  New  Hampshire, 
the  task  of  arranging  our  annals  would  be  toilsome 
indeed. 


vi  PREFACE 

Later  investigators,  such  as  Jenness,  C.  W.  Tut- 
tle,  and  the  editors  of  the  long  series  of  State 
Papers  published  at  Concord,  together  with  their 
collaborators  of  the  New  Hampshire  Historical  So- 
ciety, have  made  public  facts  long  unknown,  which, 
in  connection  with  the  researches  of  Mr.  Baxter  of 
the  Maine  Historical  Society  and  his  coadjutors, 
have  cleared  up  many  doubtful  or  disputed  points. 
Mr.  K..  N.  Toppan's  admirable  edition  of  Edward 
Randolph's  Letters,  prefaced  by  his  biography,  and 
the  Life  of  Captain  John  Mason,  in  the  same  series 
of  Prince  Society  publications,  have  made  the  rest- 
less, but  at  last  fruitless  labors  of  these  two  related 
anti-Puritans  intelligible,  and  less  reprehensible 
than  they  have  long  appeared  in  the  partial  chroni- 
cles of  Winthrop  and  his  associates  at  Boston  Bay. 
Finally,  the  indispensable  but  poorly  edited  vol- 
umes of  the  English  Colonial  Papers  and  Historical 
Manuscripts  have  shown  the  way  to  truth,  where 
the  writers  did  not  always  point  it  out,  nor  the 
editors  know  how  to  find  it. 

For  the  method  of  this  volume  something  may 
need  to  be  said.  As  a  native  of  New  Hampshire, 
where  my  latest  English  ancestors  cast  in  their  lot 
more  than  two  hundred  and  sixty  years  ago,  and 
where  all  my  later  ancestors  have  been  born  (with- 
out exception),  I  have  long  known  how  peculiar  has 
been  the  history  of  that  district  of  New  England  in 


PREFACE  vii 

one  singular  respect.  Almost  every  question  with 
which  men  of  English  and  Irish  ancestry  have  had 
to  deal,  in  the  past  five  centuries,  during  their  long 
upward  movement  towards  individual  freedom  and  V 
orderly  government  of  the  people  by  the  people, 
has  come  up  in  New  Hampshire  for  settlement, 
and  has  been  settled ;  not  by  direction  from  the 
monarch  nor  by  concession  from  the  feudal  lord 
or  opulent  aristocrat,  but  by  steady  and  reasonableX  i^ 
pressure  from  below ;  enforced,  when  needful,  by/ 
that  hand  and  sword  which  stand  in  the  escutcheon 
of  Massachusetts,  with  Sidney's  appropriate  legend, 
but  which  were  even  more  characteristic  of  New 
Hampshire.  Local  self-government,  land  tenure  by 
free  ownership,  trial  by  unpacked  juries,  represen- 
tation as  the  concomitant  of  taxation,  judges  decid- 
ing by  reason  rather  than  by  authority,  and  without 
the  trammels  of  unequal  law,  successful  resistance 
to  arbitrary  power,  and  the  quiet  creation  of 
suitable  government  when  the  fabric  of  colonial 
dependence  fell  in  ruin,  —  these  with  their  corol- 
laries and  natural  sequels  have  been  won  by  the 
plain  people  of  Rockingham  and  Strafford,  and 
maintained  in  war  and  peace  by  the  children  and 
kindred  of  those  who  won  them,  in  the  other  eight 
counties  of  this  American  Switzerland.  When  with 
this  achievement  is  coupled  an  early  emancipation 
from  the  bigotry  and  barbarity  of  pharisaical  Puri- 


viii  PREFACE 

tanism  in  the  near  neighborhood,  and  a  practical 
development  of  liberty  of  conscience  in  the  face 
of  provincial  intolerance,  there  would  seem  to  be 
room  for  a  chronicle  that  might  make  part  of  the 
Jong  history  of  civilization  struggling  against  the 
"forces  of  priestly  selfishness  and  imperialistic  power. 

Such  a  chronicle  I  have  sought  to  present,  rather 
than  a  volume  of  consecutive  annals,  which  spares 
us  no  event,  however  trivial.  Trifles  are  often  the 
hinges  on  which  great  revolutions  turn ;  but  the 
tendencies  that  develop  a  free  state  of  free  citizens 
are  not  shaped  by  triflers  nor  depicted  in  minute 
analysis.  Men  that  lead  and  men  that  follow  are 
there  needed,  and  it  has  been  the  good  fortune  of 
New  Hampshire  that  she  has  ever  had  leaders,  and 
never  lacked  the  modest  good  sense  to  follow  where 
they  led. 

In  briefly  reciting  the  eminent  services  of  Rev. 
Dr.  Langdon  (page  264),  no  mention  was  made  of 
one  strong  claim  to  remembrance  which  he  has. 
In  concert  with  two  topographic  surveyors,  Joseph 
Blanchard  in  1756  and  Abel  Sawyer  in  1784,  Dr. 
Langdon  prepared  two  maps  of  New  Hampshire 
and  Vermont  in  one  sheet,  —  the  first  engraved  at 
London  in  1761,  and  the  second,  much  improved, 
in  1784.  For  the  first  map,  the  Province  granted 
him  some  acres  of  mountain  land  north  of  Conway, 
and  the  brilliant  English  Secretary,  Charles  Town- 


PREFACE  a 

shend,  then  Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer,  to  whom 
Langdon  dedicated  it,  procured  for  him  a  doctorate 
at  Aberdeen.  For  the  second  and  much  better 
map,  he  may  have  received  no  recompense  ;  and  the 
governments  of  the  two  States,  Massachusetts  and 
New  Hampshire,  to  which  (and  especially  to  John 
Hancock,  then  Governor  of  Massachusetts)  he  dedi- 
cated the  map  of  1784,  have  not  taken  the  trouble 
to  preserve  a  copy  in  their  archives.  Its  merits 
for  the  historian  of  the  Indian  wars  and  the  Ver- 
mont dispute  are  that  it  shows  where  the  Indian 
raids  from  Canada  were  made  and  along  what  lines 
the  captives  were  carried  off,  while  it  gives  the 
localities  in  Vermont  most  involved  in  the  dispute. 
Probably  Dr.  Langdon,  then  pastor  of  a  rich  con- 
gregation at  Portsmouth,  is  the  only  New  Hamp- 
shire man  whose  map  made  him  a  doctor  of  divinity. 
It  deserves  to  be  better  known. 

Another  service  rendered  by  Dr.  Langdon,  late 
m  life,  was  to  clear  up  the  story  of  the  glebe  lands 
in  Portsmouth,  mentioned  on  page  22.  Replying 
to  the  successor  of  Arthur  Browne  in  St.  John's 
church,  in  1792,  he  showed  by  a  similar  case  in 
South  Kingstown,  R.  I.,  that  the  King  in  Council, 
about  1751,  had  decided  that  the  inhabitants  could 
adopt  the  form  of  worship  they  chose,  and  hold 
parsonage  property. 

In  tracing  the  intricate  and  perplexing  sequence 


X  PREFACE 

of  governments  and  statutes  in  early  'biew  Hamp- 
shire, I  have  depended  much  on  the  elaborate  vol- 
ume of  the  Colonial  and  Provincial  laws,  edited  in 
1903  by  A,  S.  Bachellor,  and  covering  this  ground 
fully  and  clearly.  In  describing  the  uprising  in 
1845  against  the  pro-slavery  democracy  headed  by 
Franklin  Pierce,  I  have  fortified  my  own  early  re- 
collections by  the  monograph  of  John  L.  Hayes, 
then  of  Portsmouth,  but  recently  of  Cambridge, 
Mass.,  and  the  too  brief  autobiography  of  Amos 
Tuck,  privately  printed  by  his  son,  Mr.  Edward 

Tuck  of  Paris. 

F.  B.  S. 

Concord,  Mass.,  March  1,  1904. 


CONTENTS 


OHAFTER  FAOB 

I.  Navigators  and  Colonists 1 

II.  The  Puritan  Rule  in  New  Hampshire    .        .        27 

III.  The  Masonian  Claims 65 

IV.  New  Hampshire  a  Province        ....        83 
V.  Early  Laws  and  Customs 115 

VI.  Indian  Wars 135 

VII.  The  Final  Struggle  with  Massachusetts  .        .  152 
Vin.  I'he  Switzerland  of  America  ....      175 
IX.  The  Revolution  and  its  Sequel  ....  204 
X.  Social  and  Political  Development  in  the  Nine- 
teenth Century 240 

XI.  The  Great  and  Little  Men  of  New  Hampshire  259 

XII.  The  Anti-Slavery  Contest  and  its  Results     .  300 

Xin.  New  Hampshire  in  the  Twentieth  Century.      314 

Index 339 


NEW  HAMPSHIRE 


CHAPTEE  I 

NAVIGATORS   AND   COLONISTS 

It  is  usual  to  say  that  the  begiuniugs  of  American 
history  are  clear  and  evident,  not  wrapped  in  the 
mists  of  antiquity  or  legend.  But  four  centuries,  for 
legendary  purposes,  are  much  the  same  as  fourteen 
or  forty ;  and  in  fact  the  earliest  visitation  of  Euro- 
peans to  New  England  is  as  uncertain  as  the  facts 
about  the  founding  of  Rome.  The  Norsemen  sailed 
along  our  coast  before  Cabot  or  Verrazano,  and  it 
is  quite  possible  that  Basque  fishermen  had  given 
their  name  for  codfish  (Bacalaos)  to  some  region 
of  the  mainland  or  to  Newfoundland  before  Cabot 
or  Cartier  turned  their  prows  toward  the  shores  of 
Labrador  or  the  islands  in  the  Gulf  of  St.  Law- 
rence. The  French  were  explorers  and  colonizers 
in  Canada  and  Maine  before  Sir  Humphrey  Gil- 
bert or  his  half-brother  Raleigh  set  forth  on  their 
ill-fated  colonizing  voyages.  Montaigne's  friend, 
Etienne  de  la  Boetie,  had  written  enthusiastic 
verses,  pointing  out  the  good  that  the  New  World 


2  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

could  do  for  the  war-wasted  Old  World,  several 
decades  earlier  than  John  Mason,  returned  from 
his  command  in  Newfoundland,  indited  lines  like 
these  :  — 

"  If  Hope  of  Fame,  of  quiet  Life,  or  Gaine 
May  Kiudle  Flames  within  our  minds  againe, 
Then  let  us  joyne  to  seeks  this  Golden  Fleece, 
Whose  like  ne'er  came  from  Colchos  into  Greece." 

This  Captain  Mason  must  be  called  the  founder 

Iof  New  Hampshire,  which  it  is  doubtful  if  he  ever 
saw,  though  he  gave  the  Colony  its  name,  and  fur- 
nished a  name  for  its  first  city,  Portsmouth,  —  de- 
riving both  from  southern  England,  where  for  years 
he  was  governor  of  Portsmouth.  In  his  Portsmouth 
house  Buckingham,  the  royal  favorite  and  patron 
of  Mason,  was  assassinated  in  the  summer  of  1628 
by  John  Felton,  and  Mason  had  invited  the  duke 
there  in  these  lowly  terms  :  "  Your  Grace's  lodging 
is  prepared  in  my  house  here,  which  will  not  only 
grace  it  and  myself,  but  shall  bind  me  perpetually 
to  remain  your  Grace's  most  hiunble  devoted  ser- 
vant." The  death  of  his  patron  did  not  end  IMason's 
favor  with  King  Charles,  who  had  already  granted 
more  than  one  New  England  patent  to  him  and  his 
friend.  Sir  Ferdinand©  Gorges,  and  would  have  put 
them  in  command  of  all  New  England,  to  the  detri- 
ment of  the  Massachusetts  Puritans,  if  Mason  had 
not  died  in  December,  1635,  just  as  the  measures  of 
the  Court  and  the  English  prelates  were  about  to 
take  effect.   Mason  was  a  native  of  King's  Lynn  in 


NAVIGATORS   AND  COLONISTS  3 

!N'orfolk  (December  11,  1586),  entered  at  Oxford 
in  June,  1602,  but  never  graduated,  and  became  a 
merchant  and  shipmaster  before  1610.  In  that  year 
he  commanded  a  small  fleet  sent  by  James  I  to  re- 
duce his  subjects  at  the  Hebrides ;  and  this  expe- 
dition, lasting  into  1612,  cost  Mason  more  than 
X2000,  which  had  not  been  paid  by  the  frugal 
Stuarts  in  1629.  But  meanwhile  Mason  had  been 
kept  in  lucrative  offices,  at  Newfoundland  and  in 
Hampshire,  and  was  thus  able  to  accumulate  money 
which  he  was  ready  to  expend  in  colonizing  New 
England.  He  had  received  a  patent  for  the  land 
lying  between  the  Naumkeag  River  and  the  Mei'ri- 
mac,  under  the  name  of  Mariana  (March  9, 1622)  ; 
a  second  patent  from  the  same  authority,  the  Coun- 
cil for  New  England,  was  granted  August  10, 1622, 
to  Mason  and  Gorges,  covering  all  the  land  lying 
on  the  sea-coast  and  for  sixty  miles  inland,  between 
the  rivers  Merrimac  and  Kennebec,  with  the  islands 
adjacent ;  and  this  was  called  the  "  Province  of 
Maine."  Seven  years  later,  November  7,  1629, 
Mason  alone  was  granted  all  that  part  of  the  Pro- 
vince of  Maine  lying  between  the  rivers  Merrimac 
and  Pascataqua;  this  he  called  New  Hampshire. 
Ten  days  after  (November  17),  a  much  larger 
tract,  called  Laconia,  and  supposed  to  extend  to 
Lake  Champlain,  was  granted  to  Mason  and  Gor- 
ges. By  1632  Mason  had  become  a  member  of  the 
Council  for  New  England,  which  made  all  these 
grants,  and  many  more  to  other  persons,  and  he 


4  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

was  expending  much  money  in  taking  possession  of 
his  lands  in  New  Hampshire  and  Maine. 

As  early  as  1623  David  Thomson,  a  Scot,  for 
whom  Thompson's  Island  in  Boston  Harbor  is 
7iamed,  took  possession  of  a  grant  of  land  made  to 
him  in  1622,  apparently  with  the  consent  of  Mason, 
at  what  is  now  Little  Harbor  in  the  town  of  Rye, 
but  then  called  Pannaway.  Possibly  in  the  same 
year,  1623,  William  and  Edward  Hilton  settled, 
under  a  grant  to  themselves,  in  what  was  afterward 
called  Dover,  some  miles  up  the  Pascataqua  River, 
and  this  is  alleged  by  some  to  have  been  the  first 
actual  settlement  made  in  New  Hampshire,  As  the 
Hiltons  and  Thomsons  were  friends  of  the  Church 
of  England,  and  neither  Pilgrims  like  the  Plymouth 
colonists  of  1620,  nor  Puritans  like  those  who  soon 
after  settled  Massachusetts,  it  is  probable  they  set- 
tled in  New  Hampshire  under  some  agreement  with 
Mason  and  Gorges,  who  were  ardent  supporters  of 
the  state  church.  At  any  rate,  in  November,  1631, 
a  new  grant  was  made  to  Mason,  Gorges,  and  cer- 
tain associates  (named  John  Cotton,  Plenry  Gard- 
nei-,  George  Griffith,  Edwin  Guy,  Thomas  Wan- 
nerton,  and  Thomas  and  Eliezer  Eyre)  of  a  specified 
tract  about  the  mouth  of  the  Pascataqua,  which 
had  already  been  settled  by  Walter  Neale  and  a 
colony,  at  a  cost  of  more  than  ,£3000,  —  possession 
thereof  to  be,  given  by  Captain  Thomas  Camock, 
nephew  of  the  Earl  of  Warwick,  and  Henry  Joce- 
lyn,  son  of  an  English  knight,  who  already  had 


NAVIGATORS  AND  COLONISTS  5 

lands  g^ranted  tliem  in  Maine,  east  of  the  Pascata- 
qua.  This  arrangement  seems  to  have  been  a  part- 
nership affair,  for  which  a  special  grant  was  thought 
to  be  needful ;  hiit  it  was  all  a  jjart  of  the  great 
scheme  of  Mason  and  Gorges  to  settle  their  lauds 
land  derive  profit  from  them  and  from  the  fishery 
thereto  appertaining.  Under  this  partnership  and 
the  previous  ai'rangements,  whatever  they  were, 
with  Thomson,  Walter  Neale,  and  others,  more  than 

y  sixty  men  and  twenty-two  women  were  sent  out  by 
Mason  and  his  partners,  or  adopted  by  them  from 
other  small  colonies  ;  large  and  small  houses  were 
built,  arms  and  tools  were  supplied,  a  saw-mill  was 
established  at  Newichwannock  in  the  present  town 
of  Berwick,  and  property  was  taken  up  on  both 
sides  of  the  river  near  its  mouth.  Mason  was  nomi- 
nated by  King  Charles  to  be  Vice-Admiral  of  New 
England,  and  was  preparing  to  go  out  to  his 
colony,  when  his  plans  were  defeated  by  death.  By 
this    time   (1635)   the    little    colony    had   become 

r^stablished,  and  the  advantages  of  the  situation 
were  so  many  that  it  continued  to  grow  in  num- 
bers and  in  wealth,  and  soon  became  a  shipping 
Land  fishing  station  of  some  importance.  Under 
the  original  name  of  Strawberry  Bank,  this  par- 
ticular settlement  included  all  that  is  now  Ports- 
mouth, Rye,  New  Castle,  Newington,  and  Greenland ; 
a  slight  organization  for  local  government  was 
formed,  and  arrangements  made  for  establishing 
there  a  church  conformed  to  the  ritual  of  the  Eng- 


6  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

lish  Church,  with  glebe  lands  and  proper  support 
for  a  clergyman. 

All  this  had  been  preceded  by  explorations  in  the 
waters  and  along  the  coasts  of  what,  in  1614,  Cap- 
tain John  Smith  had  christened  with  the  pertinent 
name  of  New  England.  Sir  Humphrey  Gilbert,  half- 
brother  of  Sir  Walter  Kaleigh  (both  being  kins- 
men, through  the  noble  family  of  Champernown, 
to  Sir  Ferdinando  Gorges),  had  made  two  voyages 
.westward  from  English  Plymouth  in  1578  and  1583, 
in  the  second  of  which  he  led  forth  a  colony  of  250 
persons  for  settlement  in  Newfoundland.  He  had 
five  small  vessels,  of  which  the  largest,  named  for 
Raleigh,  turned  back  in  a  few  days  ;  with  the  other 
four  he  reached  Newfoundland  in  August,  1583, 
and  thence  sailed  southward  for  a  better  situation. 
Ill  fortune  attended  him  ;  he  lost  one  vessel,  and, 
becoming  discouraged  for  the  season,  turned  back 
towards  England ;  but  in  the  longitude  of  the 
Azores,  Gilbert  in  his  Golden  Hinde  foundered  in 
the  middle  Atlantic.  He  never  reall}'^  saw  New 
England,  any  more  than  Raleigh,  sending  forth  his 
Carolina  colony,  saw  Virginia;  and  in  spite  of  great 
courage,  running  into  rashness,  Gilbert's  undertak- 
/  ing  rather  checked  than  promoted  explorations. 
Martin  Pring  was  a  less  venturesome  but  more 
successful  voyager ;  he  coasted  along  Nova  Scotia 
and  Maine,  and  in  1603  may  have  sailed  up  the 
broad  estuary  of  the  Pascataqua  as  far  as  where  the 
Hiltons  and  David  Thomson  afterward  made  their 


NAVIGATORS   AND   COLONISTS  7 

settlement.^  But  his  object  was  discovery  rather 
than  colonization.  In  1606  he  sailed  to  the  Maine 
coast  again,  commanding  a  vessel  fitted  out  by  Sir 
John  Popham,  who  the  next  year,  joining  forces 
with  lialeigh  Gilbert,  a  brother  of  Sir  Humphrey, 
fitted  out  a  colony  for  Sagadahoc,  at  the  mouth  of 
the  Kennebec,  as  Mason  did  sixteen  years  after  at 
the  mouth  of  the  Pascataqua.  But  this  Maine  colony 
abandoned  their  Fort  St.  George  the  next  year,  as 
the  French  had  given  up  their  Port  Royal  colony 
in  1609,  and  for  some  time  only  fishermen  pitched 
their  tents  or  built  their  huts  and  stages  along  this 
rocky  coast.  When  Smith  appeared  here  in  1614, 
that  experienced  adventurer  was  charmed  with  the 
rich  fisheries  and  the  prospect  of  settling  perma- 
nent freeholders  on  the  well- wooded  hills  and  among 
the  rich  valleys  of  what  is  now  New  Hampshire. 
"  Here,"  he  said,  "  should  be  no  hard  landlords  to 
rack  us  with  high  rents,  or  extorted  fines  to  con- 
sume us  ;  hei'e  every  man  may  be  master  and  owner 
of  his  own  labor  and  land  in  a  short  time.  .  .  . 
The  sea  there,"  he  said,  "near  the  Isles  of  Shoals 
[which  he  touched  at  and  named  Smith's  Isles], 
is  the  strangest  fish-pond  I  ever  saw.  What  sport 
doth  yield  a  more  pleasing  content,  and  less  hurt  or 
charge,  than  angling  with  a  hook,  and  crossing  the 
sweet  air  from  isle  to  isle  over  the  silent  streams  of 
a  calm  sea  ?  "  When  this  was  published  in  Eng- 
land, with  Smith's  quaint  majjof  the  New  England 

^  This  voyage  up  the  river  is  denied  by  good  antiquaries. 


8  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

coasts,  Captain  Mason  was  in  Newfoundland,  gov- 
erning a  colony  that  had  gone  there  in  1610.  It  is 
quite  possible  that  in  some  voyage  southward  dur- 
ing the  six  years  he  was  there,  from  1615  to  1621, 
the  patentee  of  New  Hampshire  visited  his  future 
colony,  sailed  up  the  Pascataqua,  and  saw  with  his 
own  experienced  eyes  where  David  Thomson  planted 
himself  at  Odiorne's  Point,  on  Little  Harbor,  and 
at  Thomson's  Point,  near  the  Great  Bay  in  Green- 
land. Francis  Champernown,  the  kinsman  of  Ma- 
son's friend  Gorges,  afterwards  owned  a  great  es- 
tate along  this  bay,  and  from  its  name,  Greenland, 
the  present  town  was  so  called.  But  no  certain 
record  of  such  a  visit  of  Mason  has  yet  been  found. 
Smith's  dream  of  a  colony  where  landlords  and 
quitrents  should  be  unknown  was  far  enough  from 
the  plans  of  Mason  or  Gorges.  They  believed  fully 
in  the  patents  and  monopolies  which  excited  pop- 
ular and  parliamentary  hostility  in  the  Stuart 
reigns,  and  they  aimed  at  baronies  and  lordships 
in  New  England  similar  to  those  of  England  and 
Scotland.  They  were  ready  to  spend  money  in  col- 
onizing, but  the  colonists  were  to  be  their  tenants, 
governed  by  their  kindred  and  friends  as  a  ruling 
class.  Moreover,  they  were  stanch  royalists,  very 
loyal  to  the  Church  of  England,  then  at  issue  with 
the  Calvinistic  Puritans,  and  inclining  toward  the 
Church  of  Rome,  to  which  the  sons  of  Charles  I, 
following  the  example  of  their  grandfather,  Henry 
IV  of  France,  joined  themselves  after  the  Restora- 


NAVIGATORS  AND  COLONISTS  9 

tion.  This  bent  of  mind  separated  them  from  the 
Plymouth  Pilgrims,  — poor  men,  seeking  to  estab- 
lish a  popular  government,  —  and  from  the  Puri- 
tans of  Massachusetts  and  Connecticut,  whose  ideal 
government  was  a  theocracy,  and  to  whom  roj^alty 
was  unwelcome,  though  they  must  profess  allegiance 
to  kings  whom  they  disliked,  and  who,  in  turn,  hated 
them  cordially. 

Mason  and  Gorges  .preferred  a  colony  resembling 

Vwhat  Virginia  soon  became,  —  an  aristocracy  closely 
dependent  on  the  crown,  and  supplied  with  a  loyal 
clergy  selected  by  careful  English  bishops,  who 
should  preach  passive  obedience,  so  far  as  the  tur- 
bulence of  new  colonies  would  permit  that  servile 
doctrine.  Mason  or  his  friends  sent  over  several 
persons  of  this  kind,  one  of  whom,  George  Burdet, 
coming  in  the  early  part  of  1635,  ingratiated  him- 
self with  the  planters  at  Dover,  so  that  they  dropped 
their  former  ruler,  Thomas  Wiggin,  and  chose  Bur- 
det in  his  stead.  He  was  then  carrying  on  a  secret 
correspondence  with  Archbishop  Laud,  in  which  he 
denounced  Massachusetts  Puritans  as  hypocritical 
land  disaffected.  Under  pretext  of  purity  in  religion, 
he  said,  they  were  aimingat  independent  sover- 
eignty,  —  "  it  being  accounted  perjury  and  treason 

"Tjy'their  General  Court  to  speak  of  appeals  to  the 
kjng."  This  was  an  exaggeration  of  the  fact  rather- 
than  a  falsehood  ;  for  virtual  independence  was 
what  the  Massachusetts  oligarchy  desired,  and  jjrac- 
tieally  enjoyed. 


10  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

Mason  and  Gorges  set  up  each  his  colony,  on 
opposite  sides  of  the  Pascataqua,  and  did  their  best 
to  make  both  aristocratic  and  loyal ;  but  fate  and 
the  graspin^Puritans  of  Boston  Bay  were  too  much 
for  them.  So  intimate,  and  indeed  allied  in  busi- 
ness affairs,  were  these  two  friends  that  it  is  hard 
to  distinguish  their  separate  ownership  in  the  two 
districts  of  Maine  and  New  Hampshire.  Surveys 
of  topography  were  few  and  inexact,  and  the  bounds 
of  their  granted  monopolies  very  indistinct.  Con- 
sequently, the  "  patents  "  and  charters  they  sold  or 
gave  away  soon  conflicted  one  with  another,  and 
were  for  a  century  a  cause  of  litigation  and  appeal  to 
the  English  Crown.  Mason  not  only  had  his  "Great 
House  "  in  Portsmouth  for  trade  and  exploration, 
but  saw-mills  on  the  Maine  side  at  Newichwannock, 
now  South  Berwick.  In  both  plantations  he  era- 
ployed  many  men  and  women,  and  spent  many 
hundred  pounds  sterling.  So  far  as  any  profit  ac- 
crued to  him  or  his  heirs,  this  was  money  thrown 
away.  At  his  death,  in  1635,  leaving  a  widow 
and  infant  grandchildren,  he  endowed  a  church  and 
a  free  school  in  New  Hampshire  each  with  1000 
acres  of  his  supposed  land  "  in  my  County  of  New 
Hampshire  or  Manor  of  Mason  Hall,"  and  gave 
2000  acres  to  his  native  town  of  Lynn  in  Norfolk, 
for  the  poor.  None  of  his  legatees  received  any- 
thing from  these  well-intended  gifts ;  nor  had 
Mason  ever  opportunity  to  exercise  those  great 
powers  as  Vice-Admiral  of  New  England  which  he 


NAVIGATORS  AND   COLONISTS  11 

desired  in  1G35,  and  which  Charles  I  seems  to 
have  gi'anted.  In  a  letter  to  Edward  Nicholas,  ad- 
miralty secretary  (July  11,  1635),  Mason  said  :  — 

"New  England  is  large  and  spacious,  and  the  planta- 
tions do  already  extend  SDd-miles  upon  the  sea-coast. 
The  English  inhabitants  are  supposed  about  13,000,  and 
six  sail  of  ships  at  least,  if  not  more,  belonging  to  the 
plantations,  besides  resorters  for  fishing  and  trade,  and 
such  as  carry  people  and  cattle,  yearly  amount  to  above 
forty  sail." 

But  the  new  Vice-Admiral  was  to  have  jurisdic- 
tion over  much  more  commerce  than  forty  ships  in 
a  year  could  deal  with.  His  patent  was  to  authorize 
Mason  throughout  Charles's  "  Dominion  in  New 
England,  which  lieth  between  40°  and  48°  of  north- 
erly latitude,  the  same  being  according  to  the  ex- 
tent of  a  former  patent,  which  the  Council  and 
Corporation  of  New  England  hath  now  surrendered 
to  His  Majesty  ;  which  new  patent  is  to  comprehend 
the  South  Seas  and  coasts  thereof,  together  with 
California  and  Nova  Albion,  being  all  contained 
within  the  said  latitude."  This  quotation  may  serve 
to  show  the  loose  geographical  ideas  of  the  time. 
How  extensive  were  the  powers  of  Mason  on  land, 
within  his  expected  province  of  New  Hampshire, 
will  appear  by  the  draft  of  a  charter  prepared  in 
August,  1635,  which  never  passed  the  seals,  but 
which  indicates  the  fondness  of  Charles  I  and  his 
advisers  for  arbitrary  government,  in  the  control 


12  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

and  settlement  of  American  colonies.  The  Puritans 
were  soon  to  nullify  this  aim  both  in  America  and 
England.  The  document  in  question,  cited  in  1728 
as  an  actual  charter,  nnist  have  been  but  a  care- 
fully written  draft.^  Yet  it  sets  forth  what  are 
known  to  have  been  the  wishes  and  hopes  of  the 
opponents  of  the  Massachusetts  charter  and  the 
government  at  Boston  under  it ;  and  we  may  take 
it  as  the  design  in  which,  according  to  Governor 
Winthrop,  the  Lord  "  frustrated,  and  disappointed 
them."  This  phi-ase  occurs  in  his  "History  of  New 
England,"  in  connection  with  another  passage  going 
to  confirm  the  authenticity  of  the  document  now  to 
be  quoted.    Winthrop  says  :  — 

"  One  Captain  Mason  of  London,  a  man  in  favor  at 
Court,  and  a  professed  enemy  to  us,  .  .  .  provided  a  ship 
which  should  have  been  employed  to  have  brought  a 
general  governor,  or  in  some  other  design  to  our  preju- 
dice ;  but  in  launching  of  it  her  back  was  broken.  He  also 
employed  Gardiner,  and  Morton  and  othei's  to  prosecute 
against  us  at  council  table,  and  by  a  quo  warranto  etc., 
so  as  Morton  wrote  divers  letters  to  his  friends  here,  in- 
sulting against  us,  and  assuring  them  of  our  speedy  ruin. 
...  As  for  this  Mason,  be  fell  sick  and  died  soon  after." 

This  allusion  to  a  "  general  governor  "  supports 
the  intimation  given  in  the  draft  of  charter,  that 
appeals  may  be  made  from  the  governor  of  Mason's 
county  palatine  of  New  Hampshire  "  unto  such  a 

^  See  the  whole  docmnent.  in  Mr.  C.  W.  Tuttle's  Life  of  Mason, 
published  by  the  Prince  Society,  1887. 


NAVIGATORS  AND  COLONISTS  13 

General  Governor  as  from  time  to  time  shall  be 
constituted"  and  sent  over  into  tlie  parts  of  New- 
England,  for  the  government  of  the  whole  country 
and  territory  of  New  England."  But  this  future 
Andros  was  not  to  have  any  power  to  "  do  anything 
which  shall  extend  unto  the  right  or  interest  of  any 
person  or  persons  within  the  said  New  Hampshire, 
for  or  in  his  life  or  lives,  member  or  members,  lands 
or  tenements,  goods  or  chattels  whatsoever,  to  be 
distrained,  constrained,  restrained,  bound,  charged 
or  taken  away."  With  this  considerable  limita- 
tion on  the  power  of  a  governor-general.  King 
Charles  goes  on,  in  the  document,  to  give  Mason 
power  over  the  land  and  water,  forests,  mines, 
and  fisheries,  according  to  the  right  and  powers 
"  had,  used  and  enjoyed  by  the  now  or  any  former 
Bishop  of  Duresme  within  the  County  Palatine 
of  Duresme."  Specifically,  Mason  was  to  have 
"  all  the  advowsous  and  patronages  of  churches 
whatsoever,  to  be  erected  within  the  said  tracts, 
wath  license  and  ability  there  to  build  and  found 
churches,  chapels  and  oratories,  and  to  cause  the 
same  to  be  dedicated  or  consecrated  according  to 
the  ecclesiastical  laws  of  England."  That  is,  he  was 
to  recognize  the  state  church,  and  not  the  dis- 
senters. And  the  restrictions  on  the  emigration  of 
Englishmen,  which  were  such  an  embarrassment  to 
the  Puritans,  were  to  be  suspended  in  favor  of  New 
Hampshire  ;  for  "  We  do  give  and  grant,  by  these 
presents,  license  and  liberty  to  all  persons,  both  our 


14  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

subjects  and  liege  people  for  the  present,  and  those 
of  our  heirs  and  successors  in  future  time,  (except 
such  as  shall  be  specially  interdicted)  to  transport 
themselves  and  their  families  to  the  said  Province." 
Moreover,  all  the  people  of  New  Hampshire  and 
their  descendants  were  to  be  "  holden,  reputed  and 
had  as  the  faithful  liege  people  of  Us,  our  heirs 
and  successors,  originally  springing  up  within  our 
Kealm  of  England."  And  they  were  to  take  by  de- 
scent or  purchase,  and  freely  possess,  property  in 
the  three  kingdoms,  as  if  living  therein  ;  and  to 
rhave  "  all  the  liberties,  franchises  and  privileges 
1  of  this  our  realm  of  England,  without  any  impedi- 
ment whatsoever,  —  any  statute  to  the  contrary  not- 
withstanding," —  which  shows  in  the  king  that  sort 
of  dispensing  power  which  the  Stuarts  were  so 
fond  of  exercising,  and  which  cost  them  their  throne. 
What  is  yet  more  noteworthy,  the  favored  people 
of  New  Hampshire  were  to  be  at  liberty  to  import 
and  export,  to  and  from  the  ports  of  the  kingdom, 
with  no  higher  tariff  imposed  than  five  per  cent., 
—  confirmed  by  this  asseveration  :  — 

"  And  our  will  and  pleasure  is,  and  for  us,  our  heirs 
and  successors  we  do  publish  and  declare  that,  for  and 
upon  the  payment  of  the  said  five  pounds  per  centum, 
we  do  freely  exonerate,  acquit,  and  discharge  the  same 
wares,  goods  and  merchandise  so  to  be  imported,  trans- 
ported or  exjiorted,  as  aforesaid  ;  beyond  which  we  will 
not  grieve  the  inhabitants  of  the  said  Province  of  New 
Hampshire,  nor  any  of  them.  .  .   .  And  furthermore  we 


NAVIGATORS  AND  COLONISTS  15 

do  covenant,  that  we,  our  heirs  and  successors  will  not 
impose  at  any  time  hereafter  any  impositions  or  customs 
or  other  taxations,  how  small  soever,  upon  the  dwellers 
or  inhabitants  of  New  Hampshire." 

Had  this  gone  into  effect  and  been  acted  upon  in 
the  American  Colonies  generally,  there  would  have 
been  no  occasion  for  our  Revolution.  Power  also 
was  to  be  given  to  Mason  and  his  heirs,  "lest  tlie 
way  to  honor  and  renown  might  seem  difficult  and 
hard  to  find  in  so  remote  and  far  distant  a  country," 
to  create  and  bestow  titles,  "  so  they  be  such  as  in 
England  now  are  in  use,"  and  "  to  create  vilhiges 
into  boroughs,  and  boroughs  into  cities."  But,  — 
and  here  was  the  blow  aimed  at  the  quasi-inde- 
pendence  of  Massachusetts,  — "  We  do  declare  and 
ordain,  that  the  said  Province  of  New  Hampshire 
shall  be  immediately  subject  to  our  Crown  of  Eng- 
land, and  dependent  upon  the  same  for  ever."  ^  Had 
Mason  lived,  and  the  troubles  in  Scotland  and  Eng- 
land, consequent  upon  the  narrow  and  cruel  church 
policy  of  Laud,  been  early  quieted.  Gorges  and  Ma- 
son, under  similar  charters,  would  have  introduced 

1  This  invaluable  key  to  the  proposed  policy  of  "Thorough" 
in  New  England,  though  cited  as  a  charter  (which  it  was  not)  by 
the  Mason  claimant  Allen  in  1728,  seems  to  have  escaped  notice 
and  publication  imtil  1887,  when  it  was  found  in  a  folio  volume  of 
eig-hty-four  pages,  containing  certified  copies  of  papers  supporting 
the  claim  of  the  heirs  of  Mason  to  the  ownership  of  New  Hamp- 
shire and  a  part  of  Maine  and  Massachusetts.  This  particular 
paper  is  certified  by  Richard  Chamberlain,  Secretary  of  the  Pro- 
vince of  New  Hampshire  from  December,  1680,  to  some  time  in 
1686.     It  seems  to  be  authentic. 


16  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

bishojDrics  and  orders  of  nobility  in  New  England, 
and  "  the  Bay  horse,"  as  Boston  was  nicknamed, 
would  have  trotted  a  very  painful  course. 

As  it  was,  however,  the  plantations  of  Mason  at 
Portsmouth  and  at  Newichwannock,  on  the  Maine 
side  of  the  river,  were  but  sources  of  outlay  during 
his  lifetime,  and  came  to  naught,  so  far  as  his  heirs 
were  concerned,  after  his  death.  He  and  his  part- 
ners had  sent  over  implements  and  arms,  food  and 
clothing,  cattle  and  laborers  ;  but  the  returns  were 
slight.  Captain  Camock,  son  of  the  Earl  of  War- 
wick's sister,  and  Henry  Jocelyn,  son  of  an  English 
knight,  as  we  saw,  were  to  put  the  Mason  and 
Gorges  grantees  in  possession  of  their  lands  under 
the  patent  of  1629,  and  did  so.  Captain  Walter 
Neale  had  charge  of  the  Portsmouth  plantation, 
where  Humphrey  Chadbourne  built  for  the  Maso- 
nians  a  "  Great  House  "  in  which  Wannerton,  one 
of  the  partners,  resided.  Ambrose  Gibbons  took 
charge  of  the  saw-mills  at  Newichwannock,  and  also 
carried  on  farm  work  there ;  Neale  lived  at  Little 
Harbor,  with  Edward  Godfrey,  and  had  the  care 
of  fishinoj  and  salt-makino-.  On  Great  Island,  now 
New  Castle,  land  was  marked  out  for  a  fort,  and 
cannon  were  sent  over  to  be  mounted  there.  All 
went  well  at  first,  and  so  long  as  the  proprietors 
had  money  to  furnish  supplies  ;  but  the  returns  in 
furs,  fish,  ores,  timber,  etc.,  were  very  small,  and  the 
partners  grew  impatient.  The  food  and  clothing  of 
the  seventy  or  eighty  agents,  servants,  and  women, 


NAVIGATORS  AND   COLONISTS  17 

sent  to  the  two  plantations,  were  so  costly  that  little 
was  left  for  their  wages,  which  got  in  arrears. 
Writing  in  May,  1634,  after  a  division  of  lands 
and  goods  among  his  partners,  Mason  said :  — 

''  The  servants  with  you,  and  such  others  as  remain 
upon  the  company's  charge,  are  to  be  discharged  and 
paid  their  wages  out  of  the  stock  of  beaver  in  your  hands, 
at  the  rate  of  12  shilhngs  the  pound.  And  you  must 
afford  my  people  some  house-room  in  Nevvichwannock 
house ;  and  the  cows  and  goats,  which  are  all  mine,  and 
14  swine  with  their  increase,  some  groimds  to  be  upon, 
till  we  have  some  place  jjrovided  upon  my  new-divided 
lauds.  The  chrystal  stones  you  sent  are  of  little  or  no 
value,  unless  they  were  so  great  [as]  to  make  drinking 
cups  or  some  other  works,  as  pillars  for  fair  looking- 
glasses,  or  for  garnishing  rich  cabinets.  Good  iron  or 
lead  ore  I  should  like  better  of,  if  it  could  be  found.  I 
have  disbursed  a  great  deal  of  money  in  the  plantation, 
and  never  received  one  penny ;  but  hope,  if  there  were 
once  a  discovery  of  the  lakes,  that  I  should,  in  some 
reasonable  time  be  reimbursed  again." 

He  never  was  reimbursed ;  his  new  charter 
never  took  effect ;  his  unpaid  servants,  a  few  years 
after,  divided  his  houses  and  cattle  among  them,  in 
lieu  of  wages  or  other  claims,  and  Mason  Hall,  as 
a  manor,  took  rank  among  the  castles  in  Spain. 
What  fortune  his  heirs  had  will  be  told  later. 

Such,  for  the  present,  was  the  upshot  of  this 
venture  of  gentlemen  and  merchants  to  foimd  a 
colony.    Another  undertaking,  by  another  of   the 


18  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

founders  of  New  Hampshire,  with  a  company  of 
poor  men,  united  in  the  bonds  of  Christian  fellow- 
ship, had  even  a  more  speedy  dissolution.  While 
Mason  and  Gorges  were  getting  their  charter  of 
1629,  a  small  body  of  dissenters  united  themselves, 
in  London  and  some  of  the  country  parts  of  Eng- 
land, into  a  fellowship  called  "  The  Company  of 
the  Plouofh."  Their  union  was  in  form  religious, 
and  implied  peculiarities  of  belief,  —  exactly  what, 
we  know  not ;  but  their  worldly  aim  was  to  found 
a  colony  in  New  England,  to  which  the  Plymouth 
Pilgrims  had  gone,  and  Winthrop  and  his  followers 
were  just  going.  They  therefore  obtained  from  the 
Council  of  Plymouth,  through  the  Earl  of  War- 
wick and  Sir  F.  Gorges,  a  grant  of  land  described 
thus :  — 

"  Two  islands  in  the  river  Sagadahoc,  near  the  south 
side  thereof,  about  60  miles  from  the  sea  ;  and  also  a 
tract  containing  40  miles  in  length  and  40  miles  in 
breadth,  upon  the  south  side  of  the  river  Sagadahoc, 
with  all  bays,  rivers,  ports,  inlets,  etc.,  together  with  all 
royalties  and  privileges  within  the  precincts  thereof." 

This  grant  was  made  to  Bryan  Binckes,  a  Lon- 
don man,  John  Dye,  a  London  merchant,  living  in 
Philpot  Lane,  John  Smith,  and  others  their  asso- 
ciates, among  whom  were  Anthony  Jupe,  a  nephew 
of  Captain  Robert  Keayne  of  Boston,  Thomas  Jujie, 
his  father,  a  London  merchant,  John  Crispe,  Bryan 
Kipling,  and  nearly  twenty  more,  forming  the  Com- 


NAVIGATORS  AND   COLONISTS  19 

pany  of  the  Plough.  Their  pastor,  and  one  of  the 
larger  contributors,  was  a  vigorous  old  Puritan 
minister,  Stephen  Bachiler,  then  nearly  seventy,  an 
Oxford  graduate  and  for  eighteen  years  vicar  of 
the  parish  of  Wherwell  in  Hampshire,  but  then 
ejected  for  Puritanism,  and  for  twenty-five  years  a 
wanderer,  with  occasional  preaching,  about  Eng- 
land and  (traditionally)  Holland,  where  a  son  of 
his  was  an  army  chaplain.  He  was  now  ready  to 
"  go  to  th'  American  strand,"  as  George  Herbert 
said  of  English  religion  in  general,  and  was  warmly 
welcomed  by  the  little  band  of  the  Plough,  — 
which  was  the  name  they  gave  their  first  vessel.  It 
was  but  of  sixty  tons,  and  carried  over  in  1630-31 
only  a  part  of  the  brethren  of  Lygonia,  as  their 
grant  was  afterwards  named. ^ 

The  Plough  was  a  poor  vessel  and  carried  a  poor- 
spirited  company.  Finding  the  shores  of  the  Casco 
waters  rude  and  inhospitable,  as  Popham's  colony 
had  found  their  landing-place,  twenty  years  before, 
they  tarried  but  a  while  there,  and  betook  them- 
selves to  Winthrop's  colony  near  Boston.  His  first 
entry  about  them  in  his  journal  of  July  6,  1630, 

■••  It  is  singTilar  that  Silvanus  Morg'an,  author  of  a  fantastic  hook 
of  heraldry,  The  Sphere  of  Gentry,  in  1661,  should  give  what  much 
resembles  the  present  escutcheon  of  New  Hampshire  as  "  the  arms 
which  appertain  to  Stephen  Bachelor,  the  first  pastor  of  the  church 
of  Ligonia  in  New  England,  —  Vert,  a  plough  in  f esse  ;  in  base 
the  sun  rising.  Or,  — which  bearing  was  answerable  to  his  pro- 
fession in  plowing  up  the  fallow  ground  of  their  hearts  ;  and  the 
Sun,  appearing  in  that  part  of  the  world  symbolically  alluded  to 
his  motto  '  Sol  Justitiae  Exoritur.'  " 


20  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

was :  "  A  small  ship  of  60  tons  arrived  at  Nan- 
tasket,  Mr.  Graves,  master.  She  brought  ten  pas- 
sengers from  Loudon.  They  came  with  a  patent  for 
Sagadahoc,  but  not  liking  the  place,  came  hither. 
Their  ship  drew  ten  feet,  and  went  up  to  Water- 
town;  but  she  ran  on  ground  twice  by  the  way."  A 
later  hand  afterwards  added  to  this,  "Most  of  them 
proved  familists  and  vanished  away."  Their  Plough 
dropped  down  to  Charlestown,  started  thence  for 
the  West  Indies,  but  came  back  in  three  weeks, 
"  so  broke  she  could  not  return  home."  There  was 
also  some  "  untimely  breach  "  committed  by  "  Bro- 
ther German,"  which  did  not  prevent  Mr.  Bachiler 
from  "  doubling  his  adventure  "  and  making  it 
,£100  ;  but  worse  trouble  arose  in  Boston  before 
the  second  ship,  the  Whale,  reached  Boston  (May 
26,  1632),  with  Mr.  Bachiler  and  Eichard  Dum- 
mer  on  board,  and  the  rest  of  the  Plough  Gompany. 
The  Plough  was  sold,  some  of  her  men  were  off  to 
Vii'ginia,  and  there  was  a  dispute  about  a  division 
of  the  property  of  this  frustrated  colony  of  Gasco 
Bay.  How  it  was  settled  does  not  appear ;  but 
Bachiler  and  Dummer  remained,  and  both  had  some 
later  connection  with  the  patent,  which  for  half  a 
century  longer  was  a  cause  of  troubles. 

The  overlapping  of  one  jDatent  upon  another  was 
a  constant  source  of  dispute,  and  in  this  Lygonia 
case  we  have  early  and  authentic  testimony  about 
it  from  John  Dye,  one  of  the  patentees,  writing 
from  London,  March  8,  1632  :  — 


NAVIGATORS  AND   COLONISTS  21 

"There  is  one  Bradshaw  that  had  procured  letters 
patent  for  a  part,  as  we  suj)posed,  of  our  former  grant ; 
and  so  we  think  still,  hut  he  and  Sir  Fei'dinando  think  it 
is  not  in  our  bounds.  We  cannot  possibly  relate  the  labor 
and  trouble  we  have  had  to  establish  our  former  grant. 
Many  rough  words  we  have  had  from  Sir  Ferdinando  at 
the  first ;  and  to  this  hour  he  doth  affirm  that  he  never 
gave  consent  that  you  should  have  above  40  miles  in 
length  and  20  in  breadth ;  and  saith  that  his  own  hand 
is  not  to  your  patent,  if  it  have  any  more.  So  we  have 
shown  our  good  wills,  and  have  procured  his  love,  and 
many  promises  that  we  shall  have  no  wrong.  We  be- 
stowed a  sugar-loaf  upon  him  of  some  16  shillings  price, 
and  he  hath  promised  to  do  us  all  the  good  he  can." 

Nevertheless,  the  bounds  of  this  very  grant  came 
into  controversy  a  dozen  years  later,  when  the 
Plough  patent  had  been  bought  by  Colonel  Rigby, 
a  Puritan  member  of  the  Long  Parliament,  and  in 
one  of  the  disputes  Mr.  Bachiler  was  called  on  as 
arbitrator  ("  a  grave,  reverend  and  good  man,"  said 
Rev.  Robert  Jordan,  the  defeated  party)  to  decide 
the  controversy.  He  did  so  in  June,  1641 ;  but  in 
the  interval  of  nine  years  since  his  landing  in  Bos- 
ton as  pastor  of  the  scattered  Plough  Company, 
Mr.  Bachiler  had  made  an  attempt  to  colonize  at 
Yarmouth  on  Cape  Cod,  and  had  actually  made  the 
original  settlement  of  Hampton,  with  some  of  his 
relatives  and  other  English  friends.  In  so  doing 
he  had  the  countenance  of  the  Massachusetts  au- 
thorities, who  afterward  turned  against  him  ;  and 


22  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

Hampton  was  the  first  of  tlie  four  primitive  towns 
to  accept  the  government  of  Massachusetts,  in  1639. 
Dover  followed  in  1641,  under  the  lead  of  Richard 
Waldron,  its  principal  citizen,  and  Portsmouth 
soon  after,  —  while  Exeter,  which  was  on  ill  terms 
with  Massachusetts  on  account  of  Wheelwright's 
settlement  there,  on  his  banishment  from  Boston, 
was  not  taken  under  the  Boston  protection  until 
1643,  when  Wheelwright  had  gone  to  his  next 
colony,  at  Wells  in  Maine. 

Practically,  if  not  absolutely,  the  only  "  freemen" 
or  voters  in  Hampton,  and  perhaps  in  Exeter  for 
some  years,  under  Massachusetts  control,  were 
church  members,  as  in  Boston  and  its  sister  towns ; 
but  the  members  of  the  Anglican  Church  in  Ports- 
mouth and  Dover  stipulated,  as  a  condition  of  obey- 
ing the  Bay  government,  that  no  such  ecclesiastical 
restriction  should  be  laid  on  them,  and  probably 
this  exemption  gradually  prevailed  in  the  other 
two  towns.  The  result  of  this  union  of  the  Hamp- 
shire towns  with  Massachusetts  was  to  quiet  inter- 
nal dissensions  to  some  extent,  particularly  at 
Dover ;  but  in  Hampton,  Exeter,  and  Portsmouth, 
these  continued.  At  Portsmouth  the  settlers  had 
laid  out  glebe  lands,  as  desired  by  their  deceased 
founder.  Captain  Mason,  and  had  engaged  a  clergy- 
man of  the  English  Church,  Rev.  Richard  Gibson, 
to  be  their  rector.  He  consented,  and  began  his 
work  ;  but  the  Boston  oligarchy  interfered,  refused 
to  recognize  him  as  a  pastor,  and  virtually  forced 


NAVIGATORS  AND  COLONISTS  23 

him  to  return  to  England,  from  which  he  had  come 
to  officiate  as  curate  in  Maine.  This  proceeding 
,left  seeds  of  discontent  at  Portsmouth;  such  ex- 
isted at  Exeter  also,  and  prevented  harmonious 
union  in  a  Puritan  church.  At  Portsmouth  no  such 
church  was  formed  for  thirty  years,  although  sev- 
ral  Puritan  ministers  had  preached  there  as  mis- 
sionaries (among  them  Rev.  Stephen  Bachiler), 
and  one  had  been  settled  a  long  time  (Rev.  Joshua 
Moodey)  before  he  gathered  a  church  with  a  full 
church  covenant.  These  facts  are  worthy  of  men- 
tion, since  the  local  church  was  so  much  an  element 
of  the  political  as  well  as  the  religious  life  of  the 
Puritans. 

In  1637  Charles  I  had  again  taken  up  his  pur- 
pose, declared  in  1635,  of  sending  over  a  general 
Governor  for  all  New  England ;  but  the  dissen- 
sions in  Great  Britain  caused  delay  and  finally 
abandonment  of  the  scheme,  which  had  been  urged 
by  Sir  F.  Gorges  after  Mason's  death.  Gorges 
himself  (who  may  have  gone  to  Maine  in  1617 
with  Mason,  as  was  afterwards  alleged  by  Robert 
Mason),  not  being  able  to  leave  England,  sent  over 
his  kinsman,  Thomas  Gorges,  to  govern  his  Maine 
Province  on  the  spot.  This  was  in  1640,  and  for 
three  years  Thomas  Gorges  resided  in  Maine,  and 
called  his  abode  Gorgeana.  With  him  were  asso- 
ciated in  the  government  Henry  Jocelyn  and  Ed- 
ward Godfrey,  who  had  formerly  lived  in  Mason's 
colony,  and  Francis  Champernown,  who  long  con- 


24  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

tinued  to  owu  land  in  Portsmouth  as  well  as  at 
Kitteiy,  where  he  iisually  lived.  Indeed,  so  mixed 
were  the  relations  of  the  two  colonies  of  Mason 
and  Gorges,  that  almost  every  prominent  person  in 
either  seems  to  have  figured  at  some  time  in  both. 
Portions  of  both  were  termed  Pascataqua,  as  lying 
on  that  river,  and  men  passed  easily  from  one  town 
to  another  for  residence,  —  looking  on  themselves, 
oftentimes,  as  mere  sojourners  in  either,  until  they 
should  return  to  the  mother  country,  as  many  did.^ 
The  confusion  of  patents  and  grants,  whether 
made  by  the  king,  by  the  New  England  Council, 

1  The  first  record  that  I  have  found  of  Walter  Barefoot,  who 
became  so  seriously  or  amusingly  prominent  in  New  Hampshire  for 
nearly  thirty  years,  is  among  the  York  Deeds  in  Maine,  where, 
under  date  of  May  21  and  June  3,  1657,  Mr.  Walter  Barefoot  (not 
yet  Doctor  or  Captain)  has  assigned  to  him  four  tickets  from 
James  Chanceller,  chirurgeon,  and  Robert  Greenill,  able  seaman 
(two  tickets  each),  for  their  wages  in  tlie  navy  of  the  English 
Commonwealth  under  Cromwell,  —  Greenill  as  seaman  and  cook, 
from  September  1,  1654,  to  June  10,  1655,  aud  Chanceller  as  sur- 
geon's mate  and  surgeon  from  September  17,  1655,  to  May  13, 
1657.  Evidently  Barefoot  advanced  money  to  these  two  men,  and 
took  their  tickets  to  be  collected  in  England,  —  no  amount  due 
being  mentioned.  It  is  possible  that  Barefoot  came  over  in  one 
of  these  vessels,  the  Golden  Falcon,  and  that  he  also  was  a  naval 
cliirurgeon  on  board.  Apparently  he  had  ready  money,  for  the 
next  year,  November  16,  1658,  he  advanced  to  Francis  Champer- 
nown  £130  sterling,  and  received  in  return  a  deed  of  500  acres 
of  land  and  a  dwelling-house,  in  Kittery.  In  this  deed,  and  in  a 
bond  of  August  1,  1660,  Barefoot  is  called  Captain,  and  in  the 
bond  he  is  described  as  "  of  New  England,  merchant."  The  giver 
of  the  bond  is  a  Barbados  merchant,  Thomas  Langley.  August  6, 
1661,  Barefoot  sold  a  house  by  the  seaside  in  Kittery  to  S.  Haxbert, 
tailor,  for  <£85,  with  30  acres  of  land. 


NAVIGATORS  AND  COLONISTS  25 

by  the  towns  of  New  Hampshire  before  1642,  or 
by  Massachusetts  afterwards,  was  vei-y  great  at 
first,  and  continued  to  be  a  source  of  litigation  for 
nearly  a  century  and  a  half.  The  patents  of  the 
Hiltons  on  the  Pascataqua,  and  of  Thomas  Wiggin 
in  what  is  now  Stratham,  though  conflicting  with 
the  general  grants  made  to  Mason  and  Gorges, 
were  sustained  by  the  local  courts  ;  and  in  Wig- 
gin's  case  he  was  finally  taxed  in  the  town  of 
Hampton,  though  never  residing  within  its  proper 
limits.  The  Hiltons,  opposing  the  claim  of  Mrs. 
Mason  to  the  ownership  of  their  land,  which  at  one 
time  was  allotted  to  her,  finally  recovered  it,  under 
a  decree  which  shows  what  the  customary  rate  of 
interest  was  in  the  early  years  of  the  Colony,  — 
ei^ht  per  cent.  The  profit  made  by  successful 
trade  seems  to  have  been  much  more  than  this  ; 
but  it  was  not  until  after  1650  that  prosperity  can 
be  said  to  have  visited  the  four  New  Hampshire 
towns  ;  and  it  was  a  natural  inference  of  the  plant- 
ers that,  as  this  had  happened  under  the  Puritan 
government  of  Massachusetts  Bay,  it  was  due  to 
that  government,  which  until  after  1650  could  not 
fairly  be  stigmatized  as  usurpation,  though  bearing 
heavily  upon  the  members  of  the  Church  of  Eng- 
land who  dwelt  in  the  little  Colony.  But  as  time 
went  on,  and  the  civil  dissensions  of  England  were 
quieted  by  Cromwell,  and  after  his  death  by  the 
restored  monarchy,  the  just  occasion  for  Massa- 
chusetts to  dominate  New  Hampshire  and  Maine 


26  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

virtually  ceased  ;  while  the  revived  purpose  of  the 
Stuarts  to  deprive  Massachusetts  of  its  charter 
encouraged  the  malcontent  planters  to  make  a 
party  against  the  Puritan  domination.  This  led  to 
a  contest  which  continued,  smouldering  or  violent, 
until  New  Hampshire  had  its  separate  provincial 
organization  in  1679-80,  and  was  renewed  upon 
the  overthrow  of  James  II  in  1689.  The  majority 
of  the  inhabitants  no  doubt  preferred  the  Puritan 
control ;  but  it  led  to  acts  not  justifiable  upon  any 
sound  theory  of  equity  or  English  liberty,  and  this 
portion  of  our  history  comes  now  under  view. 


CHAPTER   II 

THE   PURITAN   RULE   IN   NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

Although  the  chief  stream  of  colonists  in  aU  the 
New  England  settlements  was  Puritanic  in  opinion, 
and  inclined  to  be  democratic  in  its  policy,  there 
was  at  first  a  considerable  infusion  of  the  aristo- 
cratic element,  which  adhered  to  the  English  Church 
as  against  the  sectaries,  and  sought  to  establish  dis- 
tinctions of  rank,  founded  on  landed  property  and 
trade  monopolies.  The  grants  so  liberally  made  to 
Gorges  and  Mason,  and  to  other  supporters  of  the 
kingly  prerogative  in  England,  were  sharply  criti- 
cised in  Parliament  as  belonging  to  the  evil  class 
of  monopolies  from  which  the  people  suffered. 
^Ciike,  the  great  lawyer,  who  vacillated  between  ser- 
vility and  sedition  in  the  reign  of  James  I,  censured 
the  privileges  accorded  to  Gorges  in  the  matter  of 
jQshing  and  trade,  though  less  than  had  been  yielded 
to  Raleigh  and  his  friends  while  they  were  in  the 
royal  favor.  "If  you  alone  are  to  pack  and  dry  fish," 
said  he  to  Gorges,  "  you  attempt  a  monopoly  of  the 
wind  and  sun."  The  answer  to  this  is  found  in  an 
earlier  utterance  of  Gorges,  in  which  he  pleaded  both 
for  his  chance  and  for  the  liberty  of  his  colonists. 


28  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

"  Neither  can  there  be  anything  more  honorable," 
he  said  in  1606,  before  joining  in  the  frustrated 
colony  of  Popham,  "than  free  conditions  to  be 
granted  to  such  as  willingly  do  hazard  themselves 
and  their  estate,  without  farther  charge  to  the 
king."  This  was  the  true  doctrine  of  American  colo- 
nization, so  far  as  the  Parliament  was  concerned ; 
and  it  was  the  neglect  and  contempt  of  this  princi- 
ple which  separated  the  Colonies  from  England  in 
1776.  But  Gorges  and  his  partners  and  his  party 
expected  to  transfer  to  their  granted  lauds  the  sys- 
tem of  church  and  society  that  then  prevailed  in 
the  mother  country.  Great  landed  estates  were  to 
be  held  by  gentlemen,  and  leased  to  tenants  who 
would  maintain  by  their  labor  and  their  rents  the 
same  leisurely  and  titled  class  which  then  and  since 
has  mainly  ruled  England.  And  as  the  support  and 
decoration  of  this  class,  the  national  Church  was  to 
be  maintained,  with  glebes  and  schools,  and  tithes 
and  bishops,  —  the  whole  formalism  and  control  of 
conscience  that  had  been  cherished  by  Elizabeth, 
less  wisely  promoted  by  James,  and  which,  finally, 
under  Charles  I  and  Laud  and  Wentworth,  was  to 
provoke  the  patient  English  people  into  rebellion 
and  civil  war. 

Against  this  tendency  in  Virginia  and  in  Maine, 
and  to  a  small  degree  in  New  Hampshire,  the  Pil- 
grim Colony,  with  its  simple  form  of  government 
and  its  brotherly  and  tolerant  religion,  was  the 
unconscious   antidote.    Between   the   two   systems 


PURITAN   RULE   IN  NEW  HAMPSHIRE      29 

stood  Winthrop's  Bay  Colony,  less  democratic  than 
Plymouth,  but  more  Calvinistic,  and  therefore  more 
hostile  to  the  claims  of  the  Armiuian  and  prelatical 
chui'ch  of  Laud.  Both  these  attracted,  in  the  perse- 
cuting days  from  1620  to  1640,  hundreds  of  worthy 
lonconformists,  chiefly  of  the  yeoman  and  trades- 
lan  classes,  while  along  with  such,  or  as  a  godless 
fringe  to  the  pious  garment,  came  a  host  of  the 
shiftless,  ne'er-do-well,  or  positively  vicious  kind, 
who  naturally  found  in  a  new  country  some  relief 
from  the  restraints  and  some  respite  from  the 
fruitless  toil  of  the  fatherland.  The  samples  of 
gentry  that  came  over  were  often  of  the  last-named 
sort,  undisciplined  or  trained  in  self-indulgence,  or 
even,  in  more  vigorous  examples,  too  much  hke 
Raleigh  Gilbert,  as  portrayed  by  Gorges  in  1607. 
"  Captain  Gilbert  is  described  to  me  as  desirous 
of  supi'emacy  and  rule,  —  a  loose  life,  prone  to 
sensuahty,  little  zeal  in  religion,  humorous,  head- 
strong, and  of  small  judgment  and  experience  ;  but 
otherwise  valiant  enough."  Of  a  different  type, 
yet  showing  the  same  vices,  with  hypocrisy  and 
too  much  zeal  added,  was  Captain  Underbill,  who 
figured  for  a  while  in  Dover :  and  several  of  the 
clerical  persons  who  came  over  to  practice  their 
profession  on  the  edge  of  our  ^vilderness,  and  fell 
under  the  temptation  described  by  Hawthorne  in 
his  "  Scarlet  Letter."  In  the  fishing  stations  and 
seaport  towns  \vas  the  customary  riffraifof  such 
places,  —  apostolic  in  their  occupation  but  not  in 


30  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

their  life,  or  else  mechanical,  in  the  bad  sense  that 
Shakespeare  attaches  to  that  word.  From  this 
seething  mixtui-e  of  imprudently  good  and  incorri- 
gibly bad  arose  the  need  of  a  stricter  discipline  in 
New  Hampshire  than  the  lax  organization  of  the 
four  town  republics  could  maintain.  Hence  the 
proposal  of  the  Boston  Puritans  that  they  should 
come  under  what  Edward  Godfrey  called  "  their 
umbrella  of  religion,"  and  become  a  part  of  the 
Massachusetts  republic,  which  professed  itself  a 
theocracy,  and  was  certainly  far  more  moral  than 
Rhode  Island  or  New  Hampshire  claimed  to  be. 
The  invitation  was  accepted,  and  the  useful  union 
was  effected.  But  this  was  not  done  without  much 
protest  from  men  who  suffered  either  in  person, 
property,  or  opinions,  under  the  grasping  and 
bigoted  rule  of  the  Bostonians.  Nor  did  Winthrop 
and  his  less  scrupulous  associates  fail  to  practice, 
both  in  acquiring  and  maintaining  their  power  out- 
side their  own  charter,  some  of  those  arts  which 
better  become  the  worldly  bargainer  than  the  pious 
seeker  after  salvation  for  himself,  and  righteous- 
ness and  peace  towards  others.  There  were  touches 
of  the  pirate  also  —  for  trade  and  piracy  were  not 
distinctly  separated  by  Englishmen  in  the  days  of 
Elizabeth  and  the  Stuarts  —  in  the  unmercifid  seiz- 
ure of  lands  and  power  legally  granted  to  others, 
by  the  holders  of  the  Massachusetts  patent,  —  it- 
self transferring  power  beyond  what  the  authority 
granting  it  desired  or  thought  reasonable.    Even 


PURITAN  RULE   IN  NEW  HAMPSHIRE      31 

in  dealing  with  light-minded  rascals  like  Morton 
of  Merrymount,  who  lived  in  their  own  territory, 
and  while  their  authority  was  yet  "  in  the  gristle," 
as  Burke  said  of  their  successors,  Endicott  and  his 
companions  transgressed  English  law,  and  height- 
ened the  j)i'ejudice  against  them  at  Charles's  court, 
where  their  royal  charter  had  been  jjrocured  at 
much  cost.^  So,  too,  the  accusations  of  Morton, 
Ratcliff,  and  Sir  Christopher  Gardiner,  three  years 
after  the  charter  was  procured,  fell  through  be- 
cause money  was  freely  and  shrewdly  used  against 
the  promoters  of  that  inquiry.  Sir  Ferdinando 
Gorges  and  Captain  Mason.  And  it  was  this  hos- 
tility of  the  earlier  grantees  and  more  loyal  gentry, 
interested  in  the  colonies  of  Maine  and  New  Hamp- 
shire, which  seemed  to  justify  the  Bostonians  in 

1  C.  F.  Adams,  who  has  written  much  on  this  period  of  Massa- 
chusetts history,  says  in  his  Introduction  to  Morton's  New  Eng- 
lish Canaan  (page  52)  :  "  At  the  court  of  Charles  I  everything 
was  matter  of  influence  or  purchase.  The  founders  of  Massachu- 
setts were  men  just  abreast  of  their  time,  and  not  in  advance  of 
it.  .  .  .  It  has  never  been  explained  how  the  Charter  of  1629  was 
originally  secured.  .  .  .  That  the  original  patentees  of  Massachu- 
setts bribed  some  courtier  near  the  King,  and  throiigh  him  bought 
their  charter,  is  wholly  probable.  Every  one  bribed,  and  almost 
every  one  about  the  King  took  bribes.  That  the  patentees  had 
powerful  influence  at  Court  is  certain  ;  exactly  where  it  lay  is  not 
apparent.  .  .  .  Winthrop's  brother-in-law,  Emanuel  Downing,  was 
especially  serviceable,  —  a  lawyer  of  the  Inner  Temple.  There  is 
reason  to  suppose  that  he  had  access  to  influential  persons,  — pos- 
sibly Lord  Dorchester  may  have  been  amongst  them."  It  is  curi- 
ous that  in  July,  16.30,  Dorchester  was  very  angry  with  Captain 
Mason,  for  holding  up  the  claim  of  a  certain  lieutenant  for  a  gra- 
tuity for  which  no  warrant  existed. 


32  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

undermining  and  finally  setting  aside  the  rights  of 
Mason  and  Gorges  in  their  own  limits.  It  required 
fort^^  years  to  accomplish  this,  and  in  case  of  New 
Hampshire  it  was  soon  labor  lost ;  but  the  work 
was  begun  in  1633. 

When  the  trial  of  the  accusations  against  the 
Bostonians  came  up  in  London,  Captain  Thomas 
Wiggin,  who  had  been  associated  with  Captain 
Mason's  colony  at  Berwick  and  Little  Harbor, 
and  who  had  a  patent  himself  for  what  is  now  the 
town  of  Stratham,  happened  to  be  in  England,  and 
bore  testimony  in  favor  of  Winthrop  and  Endicott, 
and  (practically)  against  Mason.  It  is  noticeable 
that  the  accusations  themselves  have  disappeared, 
and  that  a  forged  paper,  bearing  the  name  of  Wig- 
gin  as  one  of  two  signers  (Ca23tain  Walter  Neale 
being  the  other),  and  dated  August  13, 1632,  early 
appeared  among  the  documents  used  in  contest- 
ing the  claim  of  Robert  Mason,  long  afterward. 
Whether  W^iggin  had  any  hand  in  this  forgery  is 
unknown ;  but  in  October,  ]^633]  appears  the  first 
mention  of  any  claim  by  theBostonians  to  New 
Hampshire.  Winthrop  then  wrote  in  his  journal, 
October  11, 1633  :  "  Capt.  Wiggin  of  Pascataquack 
wrote  to  the  Governor,  that  one  of  his  people  had 
stabbed  another,  and  desired  he  might  be  tried  in 
the  Bay  [that  is,  in  Boston]  if  the  party  died. 
The  Governor  answered  that  if  Pascataquack  lay 
within  their  limits,  (as  it  was  supposed)  they  would 
try  him."     In  1635  Wiggin  again  wrote  to  Win- 


PURITAN  RULE   IN   NEW  HAMPSHIRE      33 

throp  desiring  to  have  two  criminals  at  Pascataqua 
tried  in  Boston,  but  in  neither  case  did  Massachu- 
setts then  take  jurisdiction.  W^iggiu  continued  to 
desire  it,  however,  and  when  the  union  was  effected, 
ten  years  after  his  first  application,  he  was  treated 
with  unwonted  favor  by  the  Boston  Puritans,  and 
for  many  years  had  a  share  in Jheir  oligarchy. 

On  the  other  hand,  Walter  Neale^.>vho  represented 
Mason  and  Gorges  in  New  Hampshire  and  Maine, 
was  at  variance  with  Winthrop  for  one  of  those 
acts  which  the  Puritans  defended,  but  which  car- 
ries a  bad  name  with  it.  In  June,  1631,  Neale 
had  sent  to  Winthrop  from  Pascataqua  a  packet  of 
letters  from  Gorges  to  Sir  Christopher  Gardiner, 
supposed  to  be  in  Boston.  Winthrop  entered  in 
his  journal  (June  25),  this  :  — 

"  In  the  packet  was  one  letter  to  Thomas  Morton  (sent 
prisoner  before  into  England)  by  both  which  letters  it 
appeared  that  he  [Sir  F.  Gorges]  had  some  secret  de- 
sign to  recover  his  pretended  right,  and  that  he  reposed 
much  trust  in  Sir  Christopher  Gardinei\  These  letters 
we  opened,  because  they  were  directed  to  one  who  was 
our  prisoner,  and  had  declared  himself  an  ill-wilier  to 
our  government." 

Two  years  later,  being  in  Boston  on  his  return 
from  England  (August,  1633),  Neale  declared  to 
some  of  his  friends  who  urged  him  to  call  on  Win- 
throp, that  he  had  not  been  well  entertained,  the 
first  time  he  was  in  Boston,  and  besides  "  he  had 


34  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

some  letters  opened  in  the  Bay."  To  this  last 
Winthrop  made  answer,  not  quite  consistently  with 
his  entry  in  June,  1631 :  "  For  his  letters  he  pro- 
tested his  innocency  (as  he  might  well,  for  the  let- 
ters were  opened  before  they  came  into  the  Bay)." 
Whoever  opened  them,  it  was  an  act  hardly  justi- 
fiable among  gentlemen. 

Another  transaction  concerning  the  Hilton  pa- 
tent at  Dover  Point,  across  the  Pascataqua  from 
Wiggin's  Sandy  Point  patent,  shows  what  pains 
the  Bostonians  took  to  acquire  land  rights  for  their 
Puritan  friends  in  New  Hampshire.  Edward  Hil- 
ton came  over  before  1628,  and  was  in  possession 
of  his  patent  then  ;  he  sold  much  of  it  to  some 
Bristol  merchants,  who  had  it  for  two  years.  Then 
the  Governor  and  magistrates  of  Massachusetts 
wrote  to  their  Puritan  friends  in  England,  Lord 
Say,  Lord  Brooke,  Sir  R.  Saltonstall,  Sir  A.  Hasle- 
rigg,  Mr.  Bosville,  George  Wyllis,  William  Whit- 
ing, Edward  Holyoke,  etc,  urging  them  to  buy  out 
the  Bristol  men,  "  in  respect  they  feared  some  ill 
neighborhood  from  them."  Probably  they  were 
Church  of  England  men,  like  many  of  the  Ports- 
mouth planters.  The  lords  and  gentlemen  named 
above  did  buy  the  granted  land  of  the  Bristol  mer- 
chants, paying  £2150  for  it,  and,  after  holding  it 
some  ten  years,  and  sending  over  settlers  (presum- 
ably Puritans),  in  June,  1641,  Mr.  Wyllis,  Mr.  Sal- 
tonstall, Mr.  Holyoke,  and  Mr.  Makepeace,  for  them- 
selves and   partners,  "  put  the   said  patent  under 


PURITAN  RULE  IN  NEW  HAMPSHIRE       35 

the  government  of  the  Massachusetts."  This  was 
one  of  the  final  steps  before  assuming  jurisdiction 
over  the  four  towns  of  New  Hampshire.  One  of 
these  towns,  Hampton,  had  ah'eady  been  granted 
by  the  Bostonians  to  a  Puritan  colony,  headed  by 
Rev.  Stephen  Bachiler  (September  6,  1638),  and 
in  October  John  Winthrop,  Jr.,  then  living  at  Ips- 
wich, had  gone  with  Bachiler  to  lay  out  the  town.^ 
Two  years  before  they  had  encroached  on  Mason 
by  building  a  house  in  what  was  afterwards  Sea- 
brook. 

While  these  things  were  going  on  in  New  Eng- 
land, the  Charter,  and  the  very  existence  of  the 
Boston  Puritans  as  a  colonial  power,  were  seriously 
threatened  in  England.  The  enmity  of  Mason  and 
Gorges  had  been  excited  by  acts  of  imfriendliness 
(such  as  opening  their  private  letters),  and  Morton 
himself,  a  ready  witness  against  the  Bostonians, 
was  in  London  with  them.  Laud  had  become 
Archbishop  of  Canterbury  in  August,  1633,  and  a 
new  influence,  unfavorable  to  Winthrop  and  Endi- 
cott,  had  frequent  access  to  the  king.     In  Febru- 

^  Bachiler,  who  was  ancestor  of  the  Sanboms,  Husseys,  and 
Wings  in  America,  as  well  as  of  Daniel  Webster  and  many  of  his 
own  name,  was  seventy-seven  in  1638.  His  career  in  Eng-land  and 
America  has  been  traced  by  the  present  writer,  and  by  Mr.  Victor 
Sanborn  of  Illinois,  in  the  Sanborn  Genealogy,  and  in  several  con- 
tributions to  the  Granite  Monthly,  and  the  Genealogist  of  Exeter, 
England.  He  was  born  in  1561  and  survived  until  1659,  dying  in 
the  same  year  with  Rev.  Peter  Bulkeley,  the  founder  of  Concord, 
but  in  England,  to  which  he  retuined  in  1634,  from  Hampton. 


36  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

ary,  1634,  somebody,  presumably  Morton,  had  called 
Laud's  attention  to  the  fast-increasing  migration 
of  Puritans  (whom  Laud  hated  with  a  pure  heart, 
fervently),  toward  Boston.  An  order  was  at  once 
issued  by  the  Privy  Council,  delaying  the  vessels 
ready  to  sail  that  way,  and  Cradock,  the  London 
chief  representative  of  the  Massachusetts  Company, 
was  ordered  to  produce  his  charter  for  the  inspec- 
tion of  the  Council.  To  this  he  replied  that  it  was 
not  in  his  keeping,  having  gone  out  to  New  Eng- 
land in  1630  ;  and  he  was  directed  to  send  for  it 
at  once.  The  usual  arguments  were  now  offered  to 
the  pockets  of  those  about  the  Council,  and  the  ves- 
sels were  released  February  28,  1634.  But  a  new 
move  was  in  preparation,  and,  on  the  10th  of  April 

following,  a_strong  commission,  with  Laud  at  its 

head,  was  created  by  royal  order,  to  regulate  all  the 
colonies.  It  was,  and  long  continued  to  be,  a  sub- 
. committee  of  the  Privy  Council,  and  at  first  in- 
cluded both  archbishops,  four  earls,  a  baron,  two 
baronets,  and  two  secretaries,  Cooke  and  Winde- 
bank,  any  five  of  them  being  a  quorum.  Their  first 
business  was  to  nominate  a  royal  governor-general, 
then  to  dissolve  the  old  New  England  Council, 
luider  which  Gorges  and  others  had  acted,  and 
finally  to  vacate  the  Massachusetts  Charter,  which 
had  been  called  in.  All  this  was  in  view,  accord- 
ing to  Morton,  May  1,  1634  ;  but  with  that  weak 
delay  which  was  a  feature  of  the  king's  conduct, 
nothing  decisive  was  done,  except  to  dissolve  the 


PURITAN   RULE   IN   NEW   HAMPSHIRE      37 

old  New  Engiaud  Council.  This  was  nominally 
done  June  7,  1635,  in  a  formal  surrendei-  of  its 
powers  by  the  Council ;  but  even  then  it  did  not 
take  full  effect,  for  meetings  of  the  Council  were 
had  November  26,  1635,  March  22,  1637,  and  No- 
vember 1, 1638.  Yet  its  powers  in  America  ceased, 
and  Laud,  a  year  before,  had  issued  an  order  (June 
17,  1634)  enjoining  the  establishment  of  the  Angli- 
can Church  in  all  places  of  trade  and  plantation. 
The  Puritans  in  Massachusetts  and  New  Hamp- 
shire therefore  knew  what  was  in  store  for  them  if 
they  could  not  evade  or  defy  the  power  of  Laud. 

The  first  impulse  at  Boston  was  to  resist  force  with 
force,  as  the  Scotch  did  a  few  years  later,  when 
Laud  tried  to  coerce  that  stubborn  people  into 
Episcopacy.  When  the  evasive  answer  of  Edward 
Winslow  of  Plymouth,  who  went  to  England  to 
temporize,  was  set  aside,  and,  in  April,  1635,  Laud 
announced,  by  the  bigoted  king,  that  Gorges  was 
named  governor-general,  and  that  he  could  not 
suffer  "  such  numbers  of  people  to  run  to  ruin,  and 
in  religious  intents  to  languish,  for  want  of  timely 
remedy  and  sovereign  assistance,"  it  was  seen  that 
a.  crisis  had  come. 

The  declaration  of  Laud  in  1634,  intended  to 
impose  Episcopacy  on  Massachusetts,  alarmed  the 
magistrates  there,  and  the  first  impulse  was  to  arm 
themselves  and  fight  against  it.  The  ministers  of 
the  few  existing-  churches,  Roger  Williams  hav- 
ing  been  placed  under  ban,  met  in  Boston  in  Janu- 


15iy7i)S 


38  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

ary,  1635,  aud  unanimously  resolved  "  to  defend 
our  lawful  possessions  if  we  are  able ;  if  not,  to 
avoid  aud  protract."  By  the  cunning  use  of  the 
second  alternative  they  were  able  to  secure  the  first 
without  violence.  The  active  colonizers  of  the  An- 
glican Church  party,  Gorges  and  Mason,  though 
anxious  to  ship  men  and  legal  powers  to  Boston, 
for  the  installation  of  Gorges  as  governor-general 
and  the  reinforcement  of  Mason's  settlements  on 
the  Pascataqua,  had  first  to  build  their  ship  and 
engage  their  men,  and  this  cost  much  money 
which  could  not  easily  be  raised.  The  king  could 
not  aid  them  ;  he  was  living  from  hand  to  mouth 
by  ship-money  and  forced  loans,  rather  than  sum- 
mon a  parliament.  Laud  could  not,  for  all  his 
church  revenues  and  fines  must  be  devoted  to  his 
fanatical  suppression  of  Puritanism  and  the  sects 
in  Britain.  Gorges  had  exhausted  his  means  in  the 
twenty  years'  struggle  to  plant  colonies  in  Maine 
and  maintain  his  Massachusetts  rights  against  the 
active  Bostonians.  This  threw  the  weight  of  the 
financial  business  upon  Mason,  who  had  wealth,  but 
was  actively  engaged  in  the  king's  affairs,  as  pay- 
master of  the  army  and  navy,  and  reformer  of  the 
abuses  therein,^  and  he  had  paid  out  much  money 

1  A  letter  from  Mason  to  Windebank,  in  tlie  summer  of  1635, 
shows  the  abuses  of  money  matters  in  the  English  forts  and 
castles,  and  proves  Mason  a  worthy  official.  But  he  says  his  pay 
is  but  "  los.  4d.  per  diem,  —  a  very  small  pay  in  consideration  of 
his  so  great  travail  and  expenses,  and  the  service  that  he  is  to  per- 
form."    This  would  be  less  than  £300  a  year,  slowly  paid. 


PURITAN   RULE   IN    NEW   HAMPSHIRE      39 

in  New  Hampshire,  without  return.  Consequently, 
when  the  ship  he  was  buikling  for  Gorges  came 
to  grief,  the  grand  enterprise  which  was  to  intro- 
duce the  Laud  and  Wentworth  policy  of  "  Thor- 
ough "  into  New  England  lagged  and  languished. 
Mason  died  in  the  December  following,  and  in 
1636  Winthrop  in  his  Journal  was  able  to  say 
(May  31):- 

"  The  last  winter  Capt.  Mason  died.  He  was  the  chief 
mover  in  all  the  attempts  against  us,  and  was  to  have 
sent  the  general  Governor,  and  for  this  end  was  providing 
shipping ;  but  the  Lord,  in  mercy,  taking  him  away,  all 
the  business  fell  on  sleep,  so  as  ships  came  and  brought 
what  they  would,  without  any  question  or  control." 

The  powers  of  Mason  as  Vice-Admiral,  who  in 
1 1  that  capacity  was   to  regulate    immigration,  died 
1  mth.  him  ;  and  nothing  further  was  even  attempted 
\till  in  1637  the  king  actually  appointed  Gorges  as 
Igovernor-general.    But  nothing  came  of  this  either. 
Gorges  never  saw  New  England,  except  in  that  ex- 
ploring voyage  with  Mason  from  Newfoundland,  in 
1617,  if  indeed  he  undertook  that,  or  came  in  1619, 
which  is  doubted.    His  agents,  and  those  of  Mason 
and  his  widow,  could  make  no  head   against  the 
active  push  of  the  Bostonians,  and  by  1643,  when 
Laud  and  Wentworth  were  dead,  and  Charles  at 
war  with  his  English  foes,  Massachusetts  had  toler- 
lably  full  control  of  the  four  little  republics  between 
the  Merrimac  and  the  Pascataqua. 


40  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

The  first  act  of  the  Bostonians  at  Portsmouth 
was  as  bold  a  defiance  of  Laud,  not  3'et  sent  to  the 
scaffold,  as  could  well  be.  In  May,  1640,  the  colo- 
nists sent  by  Mason  and  headed  by  their  Governor 
and  Assistant,  Francis  Williams  and  Ambrose  Gib- 
bons, with  Plenry  Sherburne,  John  Pickering,  Dr. 
Ronald  Fernald,  Anthony  Brackett,  and  a  dozen 
more,  had  built  a  chapel,  parsonage,  etc.,  and  set 
aside  fifty  acres  for  a  glebe,  constituted  church- 
wardens, and  invited  an  Anglican  clergyman,  Rev. 
Richard  Gibson,  to  be  their  first  pastor,  —  confirm- 
ing all  this  by  a  solemn  deed  with  their  signatures. 
But  the  General  Court  at  Boston  summoned  this 
parson  before  them,  "  for  scandalising  the  govern- 
ment and  denying  their  title,"  but  discharged  him 
upon  his  promise  to  leave  the  country.  Winthrop, 
noticing  this  fact,  says  (1642)  :  — 

"  At  this  Court  appeared  one  Richard  Gibson,  a 
scholar,  sent  some  three  or  four  years  since  to  Richman's 
Island,  to  be  a  minister  to  a  fishing  plantation  tliere,  be- 
longing to  one  Mr.  Trelawney  of  Plymouth  in  England. 
He  removed  from  thence  to  Pascataquack,  and  this  year 
was  entertained  by  the  fishermen  of  the  Isle  of  Shoals 
to  preach  for  them.  He,  being  wholly  addicted  to  the 
hierarchy  and  discipline  of  England,  did  exercise  a 
ministerial  function  in  the  same  way,  and  did  marry 
and  baptise  at  the  Isle  of  Shoals,  which  was  now  found  to 
be  within  our  jurisdiction." 

He  was  practically  banished,  his  chapel  and 
manse  and  glebe  were  left  unoccupied,  until  the 


PURITAN    RULE   IN   NEW   HAMPSHIRE      41 

Puritan  ministers  who  went  on  missionary  duty 
at  Portsmouth  took  possession,  and  finally  they 
came  into  the  hands  of  the  Puritan  minister  first 
settled  there,  Joshua  Moodey,  in  1658.  This  was 
an  anticipation  of  what  the  Presbyterians  did  in 
England  some  years  later,  a  clerical  ancestor  of 
George  Washington  being  so  evicted. 

"  Found  to  be  within  our  jurisdiction  "  simply 
i  meant  that  Massachusetts  had  finally  decided  it 
i  was  safe  to  encroach  on  the  lands  granted  to  Mason 
and  Gorges.  As  soon  as  the  English  courts  could 
be  got  to  rule  on  the  case,  they  promptly  set  the 
Boston  claim  aside ;  and  this  was  again  done  in 
1738,  when  the  bounds  between  New  Hampshire 
and  Massachusetts  were  finally  established  as  they 
now  are.  But  until  the  Restoration  of  Charles  11 
Boston  had  its  way,  and  even  after  that  (1672) 
bought  out  the  Gorges  charter,  and  became  legiti- 
mately owner  of  Maine.  Meantime,  Wheelwright, 
the  banished  minister,  finding  his  old  enemies 
coming  into  power  at  Exeter,  in  his  own  colony, 
removed  to  Wells,  to  be  out  of  their  jurisdiction. 
Exeter,  wishing  to  supply  his  place,  invited  the 
aged  founder  of  Hampton,  Rev.  Stephen  Bachiler, 
who  also  was  called  to  Casco,  near  where  his  frus- 
trated Plough  colony  was  to  have  been.  But  Boston 
was  unwilling  that  he  should  preach  in  either  place, 
alleging  quarrels  as  the  excuse.  He  then  removed 
for  a  time  to  Portsmouth,  preaching  as  a  mission- 
ary, and  apparently  without  obstruction  from  Bos- 


42  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

ton.  Wheelwright,  after  a  few  years,  was  persuaded 
to  make  a  nominal  submission  to  his  persecutors, 
and  was  allowed  to  take  his  old  friend  Bachiler's 
place  at  Hampton,  as  a  sort  of  compromise  between 
the  contending  Christians  who  had  turned  Mr. 
Bachiler  out. 

These  clerical  squabbles  having  been  settled  in 
some  sort,  the  general  government  of  New  Hamp- 
shire under  Massachusetts  went  on  fairly  well. 
[Portsmouth  at  first  was  not  represented  in  the  Bos- 
jton  General  Court,  except  in  one  year,  when 
^Steven  Winthrop,  the  Governor's  son,  somehow 
got  in,  before  going  to  England  to  serve  in  Crom- 
well's army.  Nor  was  Exeter  ever  represented 
there ;  but  Dover  and  Hampton  steadily,  from  the 
first,  and  Portsmouth  after  1651.  The  Pascataqua 
towns  had  their  own  court,  to  which  they  elected 
their  own  justices,  but  Massachusetts  also  sent 
judges  to  try  important  cases  there,  and  most  of 
the  cases  for  Hamj^ton  and  Exeter.  Town  bounds 
were  established  by  order  of  the  Boston  legislature, 
and  extensive  land  grants  were  made,  sometimes  in 
Boston  and  of  tener  by  the  towns  themselves.  When 
new  towns  were  called  for,  the  General  Court 
granted  them  and  defined  their  extent.  Little  of 
this  was  done,  however,  until  Charles  II  made  the 
Colony  a  royal  Province  in  1679-80. 

'At  Portsmouth,  in  1651-52,  Massachusetts  ex- 
erted authority  in  a  singular  manner,  through  one 
of  its  own  citizens,  Bryan  Pendleton  of  Watertown, 


PURITAN   RULE   IN  NEW   HAMPSHIRE      43 

who  had  transferred  himself  and  his  large  property 
to  New  Hampshire,  where  he  at  once  became  in- 
fluential and  aggressive,  as  Richard  Waldron  had 
been  making  himself  in  the  adjoining  town  of 
Dover.  It  was  at  this  time  that  the  widow  of  Cap- 
tain Mason,  having  sent  a  kinsman  of  her  husband, 
Joseph  Mason,  to  look  up  her  neglected  interests, 
was  beginning  to  make  a  stir  for  her  rights  and 
those  of  her  grandson,  Robert  Tufton,  who  was  to 
inherit  the  New  Hampshire  property,  upon  taking 
the  name  of  Mason.  Consequently,  the  Portsmouth 
residents  and  newcomers,  who  had  somehow  en- 
tered into  possession  of  land,  houses,  etc.,  which 
really  should  have  gone  to  the  heirs  of  Mason,  be- 
gan to  be  uneasy  about  their  tenure  of  what  they 
had  acquired,  part  by  assumption,  part  by  settle- 
ment of  claims  for  service,  and  part  by  town  grant 
from  the  township  of  Strawberry  Bank,  as  it  was 
then  styled.  They  appealed  to  the  Massachusetts 
authorities  to  protect  them  against  the  claims  of 
the  Masons,  and  Pendleton  seems  to  have  been 
there  very  much  for  that  purpose.  He  was  already 
a  captain  in  the  militia,  and  had  been  a  member  of 
the  Massachusetts  General  Court.  On  the  5th  of 
April,  1652,  he  became  chairman  of  the  Strawberry 
Bank  "  townsmen  "  (equivalent  to  "  selectmen  ")  ; 
and  that  very  night  he  and  his  colleagues,  Picker- 
ing, Fernald,  Sherburne,  and  Johnson,  proceeded  to 
jjestroy  or^cgoceal  such  parts  of  the  former  town 
[•ecor33~as^  they  did  not  choose  to  copy  into  a  new 


44  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

record-book.  It  is  probablp,  from  subsequent  events, 
that  this  was  (lone  in  part  to  obliterate  certain  re- 
corded transactions  which  might  help  the  case  of 
Mrs.  Mason,  if  left  in  condition  to  be  used  in  court. 
There  may  have  been  other  reasons  for  the  unusual 
act,  but  none  such  clearly  appear.  At  any  rate, 
the  record  of  land-grants  and  other  acts  of  the 
town,  which  must  have  existed,  however  imperfect, 
have  not  since  been  seen,  though  allegations  about 
them  have  been  made  and  are  on  record.  If  the 
forgeries  to  which  the  names  of  Walter  Neale, 
Thomas  Wiggin,  and  George  Vaughan  were  at- 
tached were  made  at  this  time  or  soon  after,  they 
may  have  helped  the  scheme  of  the  squatters  on 
the  Mason  lands,  for  that  was  their  manifest  intent. 
Captain  Pendleton  was  then  sent  as  deputy  from 
the  town  to  the  Massachusetts  legislature,  and  pro- 
vided with  a  petition  that  the  name  of  Strawberry 
Bank  might  be  changed  to  Portsmouth.  This  was 
granted  in  1653,  and  he  continued  to  sit  for  Ports- 
mouth in  the  General  Court  most  of  the  time  for 
ten  years. 

He  was  a  member,  therefore,  when  one  of  the  most 
characteristic  of  the  severities  and  lenities  of  the 
Bostonians  toward  their  northern  fellow-citizens 
took  legislative  and  judicial  form.  In  1652  the 
Court  had  made  a  law  defining  as  a  misdemeanor 
the  act  of  any  one  preaching  on  the  Sabbath  who 
was  not  a  regularly  ordained  minister.  It  was  aimed 
specially  at  Joseph  Peasley  and  Thomas  Macy  of 


PURITAN  RULE  IN  NEW  HAMPSHIRE      45 

Salisbury,  who  had  sometimes  exhorted  the  Chris- 
tians ill  that  towu  at  the  meeting-house.  Lieuten- 
ant Robert  Pike  of  Salisbury,  for  many  years  its 
foremost  citizen,  denounced  this  law,  and  was  heard 
to  declare  "  that  those  members  who  had  voted  for 
it  had  violated  their  oath  as  freemen  ;  that  their 
act  was  against  the  liberty  of  the  country,  both  civil 
and  ecclesiastical ;  and  that  he  stood  ready  to  make 
his  decLiration  good."  Upon  this  bold  speech,  the 
authorities  voted  that  Pike  was  guilty  of  defaming 
the  General  Court,  and  ordered  that  he  be  dis- 
franchised, disabled  from  holding  office,  bound  to 
good  behavior,  and  fined  20  marks,  —  about  <£13 
6s.  For  various  good  reasons.  Pike  was  popular  in 
Hampton  as  well  as  iu  his  own  town  of  Salisbury, 
and  Christopher  Hussey,  a  leading  man  in  New 
Hampshire  for  many  years,  seems  to  have  advised 
a  petition  in  his  behalf  to  the  General  Court,  which 
was  probably  drawn  up  by  his  nephew,  John  Sam- 
borne.^   It  was  respectful  in  tone,  but  seemed  to 

^  The  first  page  of  this  petition,  in  the  orig-inal  autojrraph  of 
the  Hampton  signers,  is  preserved  at  the  State  House  in  Boston, 
—  the  Massachusetts  signers  being  copied  on  annexed  sheets  in 
another  hand.  It  was  reproduced  in  facsimile  by  Victor  Sanborn, 
a  descendant  of  many  of  the  signers,  in  his  Sanborn  Genealogy^ 
and  is  perhaps  the  fullest  collection  of  autograph  Hampton  names 
of  that  early  period.  Among  them,  though  not  in  autograph,  was 
that  of  Edward  Gove,  afterward  famous,  who  signed  as  of  Salis- 
bury, though  living  in  what  was  properly  Hampton,  because  the 
Massachusetts  men  liad  pushed  their  line  half  a  mile  beyond  what 
their  charter  allowed,  —  an  encroachment  which  the  order  of 
Charles  II  in  1679  corrected. 


46  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

undervalue  the  offense  of  Pike,  which  in  the  eyes  of 
Boston  was  heinous.  It  was  signed  by  nearly  all 
the  leading  citizens  and  members  of  the  church  in 
Hampton  and  Salisbury,  and  ran  thus  :  — 

*'  Whereas  our  loving  friend  Leaftenant  Robert  Pike 
of  Salsbery  hath  by  occasion,  as  it  is  witnessed  against 
bini,  let  fall  som  words  for  w'h  this  hon'rd  Court  hath 
bine  pleased  to  censuer  him,  —  Wee  haveing  had  experi- 
ance  that  he  hath  beene  a  peaceable  man  and  a  useful 
instrument  amongst  us,  doe  thear  for  humbly  desier  this 
honnered  Court  that  the  sd  sentance  maye  be  revoaked 
and  that  the  sd  Leaftenant  Pike  bee  againe  restored  unto 
his  former  Libertye.    Soe  shall  wee  stil  prale,"  etc. 

On  the  margin  of  this  startling  page  the  old  clerk 
of  the  deputies  at  Boston,  William  Torrey,  wrote : 
"  The  deputies  desire  the  honored  magistrates  to 
declare  their  Apprehentions  in  this  Case  in  the 
first  place."  It  was  the  upper  branch,  the  magis- 
trates, who  seem  to  have  formulated  the  wrath  and 
grief  of  Boston  at  so  flagrant  a  fault :  — 

"  The  Court  cannot  but  deeply  resent  that  so  many  per- 
sons, of  several  towns,  conditions,  and  relations,  should 
combine  togetber  to  present  such  an  unjust  and  unrea- 
sonable request  as  the  revoking  the  sentence  passed  the 
last  court  against  Lieutenant  Pike  and  the  restoring  him 
to  his  proper  liberty,  without  any  petition  of  his  own,  or 
at  least  acknowledgement  of  his  offence,  fully  proved 
against  him  ;  which  was  no  less  than  defaming  this  court, 
and  charging  them  with  breach  of  oath,  etc.  —  which 
the  petitioners  call  some  words  let  fall  by  occasion." 


PURITAN  RULE  IN  NEW  HAMPSHIRE      47 

This  aggrieved  Court  then  appointed  commis- 
sioners in  the  several  towns  of  Hampton,  Salisbury, 
Newbury,  Andover,  and  Haverhill,  to  call  the  peti- 
tioners together,  "  or  so  many  of  them  at  a  time  as 
they  think  meet,  and  require  a  reason  of  their  un- 
just request,  and  how  they  came  to  be  induced  to 
subscribe  to  said  petition."  Captain  Wiggin  of  the 
Sti'atham  patent,  the  early  and  constant  instrument 
of  the  Bostonians  in  England  and  New  Hampshire, 
was  designated  to  make  this  inquisition  in  Hamp- 
ton. In  the  mean  time,  however,  the  Bostonians  saw 
they  must  retreat  a  little,  as  they  did  when  pressed, 
whether  from  England  or  New  Hampshire,  and 
they  repealed  the  obnoxious  order  "  concerning  pub- 
lic preaching  without  allowance  ;  which  order,  we 
understand,  is  dissatisfactory  to  divers  of  the  breth- 
ren whom  we  have  cause  to  respect  and  tender." 
But  they  would  not  pardon  the  obdurate  men  who 
held  by  the  petition ;  for  Wiggin,  whose  sou  soon 
married  the  granddaughter  of  Governor  Dudley, 
reported  in  Hampton,  "  That  those  persons  that 
gave  their  hands  to  that  petition  do  acknowledge 
their  offence,  and  humbly  desire  the  Court  to  pass 
it  by  ;  except  two  persons  who  refused  to  make 
answer  to  any  satisfaction ;  whose  names  (Christo- 
pher Hussey  and  John  Samborne)  are  here  under- 
written." Accordingly  these  two  recusants,  along 
with  thirteen  others  in  the  Massachusetts  towns, 
were  made  to  give  bond  in  XIO  for  each  man  "  to 
give  answers  for  their  offence  before  the   county 


48  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

court."  ^     Partly   in    consequence    of    this    affair, 
;  »  Macy   and   the    children    of  jTnssey    soon    been  me 
^Quakers,    and   John    Emery    of   Newbury    a   few 
years  after,  being  one  of  the  recusants,  was  again 
brought  up  before  the  court  and  fined  for  "  har- 
boring Quakers."    Pike  paid  his  fine,  and  was  en- 
franchised  again   in   1657 ;    this  was   followed  in 
1658  b}^  his  election  as  a  deputy  to  the  General 
Court   which  had    fined    and    disfranchised    him. 
Fi'om  that  time  onward  he  was  seldom  out  of  pub- 
lic employment,  and  was   usually  conspicuous  on 
the  side  of  justice  and  common  sense,  as  against 
the  foolish  bigotries  of  the  Massachusetts  Puritans. 
He    took    no    part   in   the  legislation  against  the 
Quakers  in  1658,  and  he  cooperated  with  Dr.  Wal- 
ter   Barefoot    in    1662    in    releasing   the    Quaker 
women  so  cruelly  sentenced  by  the  merciless  Major 
Waldron  of  Dover. 
,       That  affair  also  was  characteristic  of  the  Massa- 
I  fchusetts  Puritans,  and  not  of  t,]ift^ow)prn1  gnnrl  spnsp 
and  humanity  of  the  New  Hampshire  people.    The 
border  of  1652,  rescinded  by  the  Bostonians  in  1654, 
was,  as  the  rescinders  "  conceived  [rightly  under- 
stood] to  be  safe,  and  much  conducive  to  the  pre- 

^  It  is  worth  mentioninEf  that  the  two  Hampton  recusants  were 
recommended  in  1079  to  King  Charles  hy  Sir  William  Warren  for 
royal  Councilors  of  his  new  Province  of  New  Hampshire,  and  that 
Hussey  was  appointed.  It  was  this  recommendation,  perhaps,  that 
led  Chalmers  to  say,  a  hundred  years  later,  "  The  statesmen 
of  those  days  sent  to  Wapping  for  recommendations  of  proper 
persons." 


PURITAN  RULE  IN  NEW  HAMPSHIRE      49 

servation  of  peace  and  truth  among  us  ;  yet  that  all 
jealousies  may  be  removed,  the  Court  doth  repeal 
said  order."  But  when  instead  of  residents  and 
good  citizens  "  preaching  without  allowance,"  like 
Macy,  English  Quakers  began  to  come  into  the 
Colony,  Boston  was  aroused  to  fierce  wrath  against 
them  and  their  abetters.  On  the  14th  of  October, 
1656,  the  Puritan  authorities  at  Boston  denounced 
the  followers  of  George  Fox  in  these  words  :  — 

"  Whereas  there  is  a  cursed  set  of  heretics  lately  risen 
up  in  the  world,  which  are  commonly  called  Quakers, 
who  take  upon  them  to  be  immediately  sent  of  God, 
and  infallibly  assisted  by  the  Spirit  to  speak  and  write 
blasphemous  opinions,  —  despising  government,  and  the 
order  of  God  in  church  and  Commonwealth,  speak- 
ing evil  of  dignities,  reproaching  and  reviling  magis- 
trates and  ministers,  seeking  to  turn  the  people  from  the 
faith,  and  gain  proselytes  to  their  pernicious  ways, — 
this  Court  doth  hereby  order,"  etc.,  etc. 

What  were  these  orders  ?  (1)  That  a  shipmaster 
bringing  known  Quakers  into  Massachusetts  or  New 
Hampshire,  or  the  Maine  seaboard,  should  be  fined 
XlOO,  and  imprisoned  till  this  was  paid  or  secured  ; 
next  that  he  should  carry  them  back  to  the  place 
where  he  took  them  on  board.  (2)  That  the  Quak- 
ers themselves  be  "  forthwith  committed  to  the 
house  of  correction,  and  at  their  entrance  to  be 
severely  whipt,  and  kept  constantly  to  work  —  and 
none  suffered  to  converse  or  speak  with  them  dur- 
ing their  imprisonment."    (3)  That  persons  import- 


50  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

ing  "  Quaker  books  or  writings  concerning  their 
divilisli  opinions  "  be  fined  £5  for  each  book,  and 
whoever  "  shall  disperse  or  conceal  any  such,  and 
shall  not  immediately  deliver  the  same  to  the  next 
magistrate,"  be  also  fined  .£5.  (4)  That  any  per- 
son defending  ex  animo  Quaker  opinions  or  books, 
be  fined  40  shillings  for  the  first  offence,  <£4  for 
the  second,  and  if  still  persistent  "  shall  be  com- 
mitted to  the  house  of  correction  till  sent  out  of 
the  land,  being  sentenced  to  banishment."  (6)  And 
lastly,  "  What  person  or  persons  soever  shall  revile 
the  office  or  person  of  magistrates  or  ministers,  as 
is  usual  with  the  Quakers,  shall  be  severely  whipt, 
or  pay  the  sum  of  <£5." 

Barbarous  as  this  law  was,  it  was  made  worse 
in  1657-59,  and  in  1661,  by  other  enactments  pun- 
ishing the  harboring  of  Quakers,  and  directing 
the  cutting  off  their  ears  and  boring  through  their 
tongues,  and  inflicting  death  if  any  return  after 
banishment ;  and  removing  all  distinction  between 
domestic  and  foreign  Quakers.  Under  this  unlaw- 
ful death  penalty,  totally  repugnant  to  English  law, 
though  that  was  cruel  enough  in  the  seventeenth 
century,  three  Quakers,  William  Robinson,  Marma- 
duke  Stephenson,  and  Mary  Dyer,  were  sentenced 
by  Governor  Endicott  in  person,  to  be  hanged  in 
October,  1659,  and  were  hanged  on  Boston  Com- 
mon, and  buried  there.  In  all  this  wicked  legisla- 
tion, Richard  Waldron  of  Dover  cooperated,  being 
a  deputy  from  his  town  every  year  from  1656  to 


PURITAN  RULE  IN  NEW  HAMPSHIRE      51 

1663,  inclusive.  He  was  therefore  a  suitable  per- 
son to  execute  these  laws  in  New  Hampshire  ;  and 
he  made  his  town  and  Colony  infamous  by  passing 
the  following  sentence,  as  magistrate,  on  three 
Quaker  women,  December  22,  1662  :  — 

"  To  the  Constables  of  Dover,  Hampton,  Salisbury, 
Newbury,  Rowley,  Ipswich,  Wenbam,  Lynn,  Boston, 
Roxbury,  Dedham,  and  until  these  vagabond  Quakers 
are  out  of  this  jurisdiction  :  ^  — 

"  You  and  every  of  you  are  required  in  the  Kuig's 
Majesty's  name,  to  take  these  vagabond  Quakers,  Anna 
Coleman,  Mary  Tompkins  and  Alice  Ambrose,  and  make 
them  fast  to  the  cart's  tail ;  and  drawing  the  cart  through 
your  several  towns,  to  whip  them  upon  their  naked  backs, 
not  exceeding  ten  stripes  apiece  on  each  of  them,  in  each 
town ;  and  so  convey  them  from  constable  to  constable 
till  they  are  out  of  this  jurisdiction,  as  you  will  answer 
it  at  your  peril ;  and  this  shall  be  your  warrant.  Per  me, 
Richard  Waldron." 

^  This  list  of  towns  points  out  the  road  the  cart  was  to  follow : 
from  Dover  through  Wiggin's  Stratham  patent  to  Hampton,  thence 
through  Hampton  Falls  and  Seabrook  along  the  present  electrio 
railway  line  to  Salisbury.  There,  ferried  over  the  broad  Merrimac, 
they  came  to  Newbury  Port,  where  Emery  and  Greenland  lived. 
Had  not  Barefoot  intervened,  they  would  then  have  followed  the 
old  winding  road  through  Rowley,  Ipswich,  and  Wenham,  avoiding 
Salem,  to  Lynn,  and  so  on.  Barefoot,  who  was  a  scion  of  a  mer- 
cantile family  in  London,  the  head  of  which  for  a  century  and  a 
half  held  the  ancient  manor  of  Lambourn  on  the  Rodon  in  Essex, 
had  come  to  Kittery  in  1657,  probably  in  one  of  the  naval  vessels 
of  Cromwell,  on  which  he  may  have  been  surgeon.  He  and  his 
sister,  Sarah  Wiggin,  were  Anglicans,  however,  and  joined  with 
Jocelyn,  Champernown,  and  others  of  that  faith  in  resisting  the 
Puritan  domination. 


52  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

According  to  uniform  tradition,  quite  supported 
by  his  brave  and  crafty  character,  Dr.  Walter 
Barefoot,  then  practicing  medicine  in  Dover,  where 
Thomas  Wiggin,  Jr.,  was  his  brother-in-law,  met  or 
followed  this  lamentable  procession  in  Salisbury, 
and  there,  with  the  connivance  of  Major  Pike,  a 
magistrate,  took  the  poor  women  from  the  consta- 
ble, under  pretext  of  delivering  them  in  Newbury 
to  the  constable  there.  Instead  of  which  he  set 
them  free,  perhaps  with  the  aid  of  his  brother  phy- 
sician. Dr.  Henry  Greenland,  then  newly  come  to 
Newbury  to  practice,  and  John  Emery,  one  of  the 
recusants  of  ten  years  before,  with  Lieutenant 
Pike. 

AVhen  the  Quaker  historians  came  to  narrate 
these  infamies,  they  said,  and  perhaps  with  truth, 
that  the  warrant  signed  by  Waldron  was  actually 
written  by  the  Dover  minister,  Rev.  John  Rayner. 
The  whip  used  was  three-thonged,  so  that  ten  stripes 
meant  thirty  blows  ;  and  the  peculiar  cruelty  of  this 
flogging  from  town  to  town,  as  Mr.  Adams  has 
said,^  was  that  "  the  victim's  wounds  became  cold 
between  the  times  of  punishment,  and  in  winter 
sometimes  frozen,  which  made  the  torture  intoler- 
ably agonizing."  Charles  II,  a  good-natured  per- 
son, with  all  his  vices  and  treasons,  was  shocked  at 

1  See  The  Emancipation  of  Massachusetts,  by  Brooks  Adams, 
pp.  148,  149.  The  view  taken  by  this  author  of  the  g'eneral  Puritan 
policy  is  rather  extreme,  but  his  facts  and  comments  concerning 
the  persecution  of  Quakers  are  generally  sound. 


PURITAN  RULE  IN   NEW  HAMPSHIRE      53 

iwhat  he  heard  from  Boston  of  these  Quaker  whip- 
pings, and  sent  over  a  letter  in  1661  foirbiddmg 

'  such  punishments,  and  directing  the  accused  Quak- 
ers to  be  sent  to  England  for  trial.  It  was  partly 
in  consequence  of  these  enormities,  though  chiefly 
at  the  instance  of  the  ancient  colonists  who  had 
been  loyal  to  their  king,  that  Charles  in  1664  sent 
over  his  commissioners  to  bring  the  Boston  Puri- 
tans to  account  for  their  encroachments  on  his 
father's  patents  and  his  own  subjects.  This  was  the 
bec^inning:  of  th&  end,  so  far  as  the  Puritan  domi- 
nation  was  concerned,  although  it  was  nearly 
twenty  years  more  before  Massachusetts  gave  up 
her  control  in  New  Hampshire,  and  she  sought  to 
reestablish  it  under  William  III. 

Nothing  satisfactory  to  the  heirs  of  Mason  was 
done  by  the  Massachusetts  authorities  from  1651 
to  1654.  The  reason  for  this  may  perhaps  be  found 
in  statements  made  by  Francis  Champernown  and 
other  early  settlers  at  Portsmouth,  when  the  royal 
commissioners,  Carr,  Cartwright,  and  Maverick, 
came  to  New  Hampshire  in  1665  to  inquire  into 
the  administration  of  the  Puritans  there.  They 
said,  and  the  case  seems  to  have  been  much  as  here 
stated,  whatever  justification  the  Portsmouth  Puri- 
tans may  have  had  for  their  action  :  — 

*'  Your  petitioners  have  been  kept  under  the  govern- 
ment of  the  Massachusetts  by  an  usurped  power,  whose 
laws  are  derogatory  to  the  laws  of  England.  Under 
which  power  five  or  six  of  the  richest  men  of  this  parish 


54  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

have  ruled,  swayed  and  ordered  all  offices,  both  civil  and 
military,  at  their  pleasures.  .  .  .  And  at  the  election  of 
officers  the  aforesaid  party,  or  the  greatest  part  of  them, 
have  always  kept  themselves  in  offices  for  the  managing 
of  the  gifts  of  land  and  the  settling  of  them  :  whereby 
they  have  engrossed  the  greatest  part  of  the  lands  within 
the  precincts  of  this  plantation  into  their  own  hands. 
The  parties  we  petition  against  are  Joshua  Moodey,  Min- 
ister, Richard  Cutt,  John  Cutt,  Elias  Styleman,  Nathan- 
iel Fryer,  Brian  Pendleton,  Merchants." 

Bryan  Pendleton  has  already  been  mentioned. 
The  brothers  Cutt  (who  afterward  had  their  name 
spelled  Cutts  by  their  descendants  because  they 
found  or  imagined  a  connection  between  their  fam- 
ily and  that  of  the  brave  Lord  Cutts  who  fought 
under  Marlborough)  were  wealthy  merchants  who 
established  themselves  iu-  Portsmouth  some  time 
before  1650.  They  soon  came  to  be  the  richest 
proprietors  there,  and  perhaps  the  richest  mer- 
chants in  New  England.  They  occupied,  and  claimed 
to  own,  the  "  Great  House  "  built  for  Captain  Ma- 
son by  Humphrey  Chadbourne,  one  of  his  servants, 
and  they  had  large  estates  in  land.  A  third  brother, 
Robert,  coming  over  later,  founded  a  family  on  the 
Maine  side  of  the  Pascataqua,  but  had  interests  in 
New  Hampshire.  Stileman  and  Fryar  were  men  of 
less  importance,  but  active  in  business,  and  clerkly 
by  education.  ISIr.  Moodey,  the  minister,  was  of  an- 
other type,  but  well  fitted  to  lead  his  parishioners 
in  aggression  or  resistance ;  a  learned,  religious,  and 


PURITAN   RULE   IN   NEW   HAMPSHIRE       55 

brave  man,  educated  at  the  Puritan  college  of  Har- 
vard, and  doing  credit  to  his  training  there.  To 
him,  as  to  Winthrop  and  Cotton,  Endicott  and  Nor- 
ton, the  Puritan  cause  was  the  cause  of  God  and 
His  saints  ;  and  they  had  little  hesitation  at  enroll- 
ing themselves  among  the  saints.  Moodey  had  come 
to  Portsmouth  from  a  tutoi'ship  at  Cambridge, 
where  he  graduated  in  1653,  and  was  settled  as 
minister  for  more  than  a  dozen  years  before  he 
gathered  a  church,  —  probably  because  of  the  great 
number  of  Anglican  and  irreligious  persons  in  his 
town.  We  shall  hear  more  of  him  under  the  Cran- 
field  government. 

Charles  II  had  been  but  a  few  months  on  the 
throne,  when,  in  November,  1660,  the  heirs  of  John 
Mason  and  his  partners,  styling  themselves  "  pa- 
tentees and  inhabitants  of  the  Provinces  of  Hamp- 
shire and  Maine,  and  several  other  tracts  of  land 
in  New  England,"  petitioned  the  king  for  justice. 
Kobert  Mason,  then  a  London  merchant,  and  Ed- 
ward Godfrey,  who  had  been  an  agent  of  Gorges 
in  Maine,  were  the  chief  petitioners,  alleging  that 
in  settling  and  improving  "  sundry  tracts  of  land  in 
New  England,  with  diverse  privileges  thereunto 
granted"  they  had  expended  above  .£20,000;  "they 
governing  the  colonies  quietly  and  peaceably  many 
years,  according  to  the  laws  of  your  Majesty's  king- 
dom of  England."  This  might  be  true  of  Maine 
under  Gorges  and  Godfrey,  but  was  true  only  for 
a  few  years  of  Mason's  colony.     They  went  on  to 


56  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

allege,  raising  a  prejudice  against  their  Massachu- 
setts opponents,  — 

"  That  during  these  late  sad  times  of  distraction  in 
England,  those  of  the  patent  and  Colony  of  the  Massa- 
chusetts, intending  to  make  themselves  a  free  state,  and 
to  bring  all  that  your  Majesty's  vast  territory  under  their 
power  and  subjection,  have  by  strong  hand  and  menaces 
deprived  your  petitioners  of  their  lands  and  privileges, 
seized  on  their  cattle,  and  would  have  imposed  an  oath 
of  fidelity  to  their  government,  without  any  relation  to 
your  kingdom  of  England  ;  laying  great  fines  upon  those 
that  should  seek  to  England  for  relief." 

This  also  was  true  of  Maine  and  of  some  few 
individuals  in  New  Hampshire,  but  was  rather 
an  exaggeration.  Thej  then  asked  that  their  case 
might  be  referred  to  a  board  composed  of  Lords 
Willoughby  and  Baltimore,  Dr.  Kobert  Mason,  Sir 
James  Bunce,  Sir  John  Jacob,  Sir  Nicholas  Crisp, 
Sir  Richard  Ford,  Drs.  Giles  Swett,  John  Exton, 
William  Turner,  and  John  Myles,  and  Thomas 
Povey,  Esq.  This  was  done.  Of  this  board  of 
twelve,  only  seven.  Sir  James  Bunce,  Sir  Richard 
Ford,  Mr.  Povey,  and  Drs.  Mason,  Exton,  Swett, 
and  Myles,  seem  to  have  sat.  They  reported  in 
1667  that  they  should  only  state  facts,  but  render 
no  opinion  ;  and  among  such  alleged  facts  were 
these :  — 

"  The  said  John  Mason  and  the  said  Edward  Godfrey 
did  expend  considerable  sums  of  money  in  settling  colo- 
nies.   Neither  they  nor  the  Massachusetts  grantees  were 


PURITAN  RULE   IN  NEW  HAMPSHIRE      57 

to  act  anything  repugnant  to  the  law  of  England  ;  nor 
was  the  corporation  of  Boston  in  New  England  to  extend 
their  limits  further  than  three  miles  northward  of  Mer- 
rimac  River.  And  as  a  memorial  and  evidence  thereof 
the  government  of  the  Massachusetts  did  set  up  a  house 
ahout  30  years  since,  which  was  called  the  Bound  House, 
and  is  known  by  that  name  to  this  day.  The  inhabitants 
and  corporation  of  the  Massachusetts  rested  contented 
for  sixteen  years  together,  until,  about  the  year  1652, 
they  did  enlarge  and  stretch  their  line  above  threescore 
miles  beyond  their  known  and  settled  bounds  aforesaid. 
And  have  thereby  not  only  invaded  and  encroached,  but 
by  menaces  and  armed  force  compelled  your  Majesty's 
subjects  to  submit  to  their  usurped  and  arbitrary  govern- 
ment, which  they  have  declared  to  be  independent  of  the 
Crown  of  England,  and  not  subordinate  thereto.  The 
Colony  of  the  Massachusetts  hath  for  many  years  past 
endeavored  to  model  and  contrive  themselves  into  a  free 
state  or  commonwealth,  without  any  relation  to  the 
Crown  of  England ;  and  some  have  been  so  bold  as  pub- 
licly to  affirm  that,  if  his  Majesty  should  send  them  a 
Governor,  the  several  towns  and  churches  throughout  the 
whole  country  under  their  government  did  resolve  to 
oppose  him." 

This  report  was  made  January  21,  1667,  after  a 
hearing  at  which  John  Leverett,  the  Boston  agent, 
was  jaresent,  but  without  special  authority.  The 
board  also  said  that  Robert  Mason  and  Edward 
Godfrey  "had  been  damnified  to  the  value  of 
X5000."  Invidious  as  this  report  was,  and  based 
more  on  the  proceedings  in  Maine  than  those  in 


58  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

New  Hampshire,  the  facts  stated  could  not  be  flatly 
denied,  though  they  could  be  ingeniously  explained. 
Massachusetts  had  tried  to  make  itself  a  common- 
wealth ;  indeed,  had  called  itself  so ;  had  adopted 
and  executed  laws  unknown  to  England  and  repug- 
nant to  the  English  system  ;  had  encroached  on  its 
neighbors,  used  menaces  and  a  show  of  force,  and 
had  even  proposed  resistance  to  a  royal  order. 

The  commission  of  1664  had  been  sent  out  and 
had  made  its  report  ere  this  board  of  1667  reported. 
But  in  May,  1664,  Robert  Mason,  who  was  ever 
dilatory,  had  written  to  Colonel  Nichols,  a  com- 
missioner, making  him  his  attorney  for  the  disposal 
of  lands  in  New  Hampshire,  and  giving  these  state- 
ments :  — 

"  My  grandfather,  John  Mason,  expended  about 
8000  pounds  there,  the  benefit  of  which  we  enjoyed  till 
about  1650.  There  are  now  about  1000  families  on  the 
land.  I  have  a  kinsman,  Mr.  Joseph  Mason,  living  at 
Portsmouth,  who  was  formerly  my  agent ;  but  by  reason 
of  his  age  not  now  able  to  act  therein." 

He  then  sent  Nichols  a  power  of  attorney,  wit- 
nessed by  Mason's  two  clerks,  Robert  Barlow  and 
William  Story,  —  which  power  Nichols,  at  the  sug- 
gestion of  his  brother  commissioners,  made  over  to 
Nicholas  Shapleigh,  —  and  gave  Nichols  this  fair 
direction  as  to  occupants  of  his  lands  "  that  have 
been  improved  for  others  at  their  charge : "  "I 
leave  that  to  yourself,  to  take  such  rent  as  ma}"^  give 
them   encouragement."     Indeed,   had   the   matter 


PURITAN   RULE  IN   NEW  HAMPSHIRE      59 

been  left  to  Mason  and  fair-minded  men  on  both 
sides,  an  arrangement  could  have  been  made,  equit- 
able to  both.  But  the  affair  became  complicated 
with  the  question  of  the  Bostonian  misdeeds  and 
the  determination  of  the  king-  to  have  crown  colo- 
nies there,  and  so  a  just  settlement  was  so  long 
deferred  as  to  be  impossible. 

The  commission  of  Charles  II  was  signed  by  him 
April  25, 1664,  and  two  of  his  commissioners,  Sam- 
uel Maverick  and  Robert  Carr,  landed  at  Ports- 
mouth July  20,  whence  they  notified  William 
Coventry,  the  English  statesman,  and  the  Boston 
authorities  of  their  arrival ;  but  they  proceeded  at 
once  to  the  Duke  of  York's  territories,  of  which  a 
third  commissioner,  Colonel  Richard  Nichols,  was 
Governor.  A  fourth  was  George  Cartwright,  and 
all  were  able  and  fair-minded  men,  but  devoted  to 
the  Cavalier  interest  and  the  Church  of  England. 
Maverick  was  an  early  colonist,  having  come  to 
New  England  in  1624,  six  years  before  Winthrop, 
whom  he  entertained  at  Winisimet  in  his  fortified 
house,  late  in  June,  1630.  He  was  a  Cornish  man, 
born  in  1602,  well  educated  and  courteous,  and  was 
described  by  John  Josselyn,  the  botanist,  in  1638, 
as  "  the  only  hospitable  man  in  all  the  country, 
giving  entertainment  to  all  comers,  gratis."  His 
home  was  in  what  is  now  East  Boston,  and  he 
owned  the  whole  island.  In  a  religious  persecution 
by  the  Puritans  (1648)  he  was  imprisoned  and 
fined,  and  in  1650  sold  his  fine  island  and  removed 


60  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

with  his  family  to  Virginia,  or  some  other  colony 
more  tolerant  than  Boston  Bay.  Before  the  Resto- 
ration he  was  in  England,  and  it  was  largely  upon 
his  representations  and  those  of  the  Maine  colonists 
that  he  and  his  colleagues  were  sent  over  in  1664. 
In  his  preamble  to  their  commission  Charles  II 
said :  — 

"  Several  of  our  Colonies  in  New  England,  and  other 
our  loving  subjects,  have  complained  of  differences  and 
disputes  arisen  upon  the  limits  and  bounds  of  their  several 
jurisdictions  (whereby  unneighborly  and  unbrotherly  con- 
tentions have  and  may  arise,  to  the  damage  and  discredit 
of  the  English  interests),  and  that  all  our  good  subjects 
residing  there,  and  being  planters  within  the  several  colo- 
nies, do  not  enjoy  the  liberties  and  privileges  granted  to 
them  by  our  several  charters." 

These  complaints  were  well  founded  as  regards 
New  Hampshire,  Maine,  and  Rhode  Island,  and  the 
asTCTessors  in  all  cases  were  the  Puritans  of  Massa- 
chusetts.  But  it  was  a  year  later  that  the  commis- 
sioners began  their  inquiries  in  New  Hampshire 
and  Maine.  In  the  mean  while  the  once  arrogant, 
persecuting  Bostonians  sent  a  whining  and  unmanly 
letter  to  King  Charles,  prostrating  themselves  at 
his  royal  feet,  and  lying  there  indeed,  as  these  pas- 
sages will  prove :  — 

"  As  the  high  place  you  sustain  on  earth  doth  number 
you  here  among  the  gods,  so  we  hope  you  will  imitate  the 
God  of  Heaven,  in  being  ready  to  maintain  the  cause  of 


PURITAN   RULE   IN   NEW   HAMPSHIRE      61 

the  afflicted,  and  the  right  of  the  poor.  ...  In  this  case, 
dread  Sovereign  !  our  refuge  under  God  is  your  royal 
self.  ...  It  is  indeed  a  grief  to  our  liearts  to  see  your 
Majesty  put  upon  this  extraordinary  charge  and  cost, 
about  a  business  the  product  whereof  can  never  reim- 
burse the  one  half  of  what  will  be  expended  upon  it.  For 
such  is  the  poverty  and  meanness  of  the  people  of  tliis 
country,  that  if,  with  hard  labor  men  get  a  subsistence 
for  their  families,  't  is  as  much  as  the  generality  are  able 
to  do.  .  .  .  Sir,  the  allknowing  God  knows  our  greatest 
ambition  is  to  live  a  poor  and  quiet  life,  in  a  corner  of 
the  world,  without  offence  to  God  or  man.  .  .  .  We  are 
carefully  studious  of  all  due  subjection  to  your  Majesty. 
And  should  divine  Providence  ever  offer  an  opportunity 
wherein  we  might,  in  any  righteous  way,  according  to 
our  poor  and  mean  capacity,  testify  our  dutiful  affection 
to  your  Majesty,  we  hope  we  should  most  gladly  embrace 
it.  .  •  .  Let  our  government  live,  our  patent  live,  our 
magistrates  live,  our  laws  and  liberties  live,  our  religious 
enjoyments  live  !  so  shall  we  all  have  yet  further  cause  to 
say,  from  our  hearts,  let  the  King  live  forever  !  " 

Hardly  a  statement  in  this  fulsome  address  was 
true.  The  country  was  not  poor,  the  Puritans  were 
not  afflicted,  nor  loyal,  nor  ambitious  to  live  in 
quiet ;  and  their  gravest  falsehood  was  to  say, 
"  We  keep  ourselves  within  our  line,  and  meddle 
not  with  matters  abroad."  The  commissioners  were 
right  in  charging  them  with  encroachments  thus  :  — 

"  It  was  great  reason  and  high  time  for  us  to  give  over 
treating  in  private  with  those  who,  by  sound  of  trumpet 
denied  that  authority  which  the  King  had  over  them, 


62  NEW   HAI^IPSHIRE 

and  by  which  we  were  to  act.  The  fixing,  naming 
and  owning  a  Bound-house,  three  large  miles  north  from 
Merrin)ac  River  about  12  years  together,  by  the  Corpo- 
ration of  the  Massachusetts  (after  the  fixing  of  which 
Bound-house  many  other  patents  were  granted  by  the 
Council  of  Plymouth  and  by  the  King),  must  necessarily 
determine  the  limits  of  the  said  Corporation.  .  .  .  The 
King  did  not  grant  away  his  sovereignty  over  you  when 
he  made  you  a  corporation.  When  His  Majesty  gave  you 
power  to  make  wholesome  laws  and  to  administer  justice 
by  them,  he  parted  not  with  his  right  of  judging  wliether 
those  laws  weie  wholesome,  or  whether  justice  was  ad- 
ministered accordingly.  When  he  gave  you  authority 
over  such  of  his  subjects  as  lived  within  the  limits  of 
your  jurisdiction,  he  made  them  not  your  subjects,  nor 
yours  their  supreme  authority.  .  .  .  'Tis  possible  that 
the  charter  which  you  so  much  idolize  may  be  forfeited  ; 
and  it  may  probably  be  supposed  that  it  hath  been 
many  ways  forfeited,  until  you  have  cleared  yourselves 
of  those  many  injustices,  oppressions,  violences  and  blood, 
for  which  you  are  complained  against." 

Here  was  a  plain  denial  of  the  Massachusetts  right 
over  New  Hampshire  and  Maine,  and  a  summing 
up  of  the  Puritan  injustice  toward  Baptists  and 
Quakers.  But  in  a  later  report  to  the  king,  Carr 
and  Maverick  were  more  specific,  and  told  more 
truth  than  the  Bostonians  were  ready  to  refute. 

"  To  elude  His  Majesty's  desire  of  their  admitting 
men  civil  and  of  competent  estates  to  be  freemen,  they 
liave  made  an  act  whereby  he  that  is  24  years  old,  a 
housekeeper,  and  brings  one  certificate  of  his  civil  life, 


PURITAN  RULE  IN  NEW  HAMPSHIRE      63 

another  of  his  heing  orthodox  in  matters  of  faith,  and  a 
third  of  his  paying  ten  shillings,  besides  head-money,  at 
a  single  rate,  may  then  have  liberty  to  make  his  desire 
known  to  the  Court,  and  it  shall  be  put  to  vote.  Scarce 
three  in  a  hundred  pay  10s.  at  a  single  rate ;  yet  if  this 
rate  were  general  it  would  be  just ;  but  he  that  is  a 
church-member,  though  he  be  a  servant,  and  pay  not  two- 
pence, may  be  a  freeman.  They  will  not  admit  any  who 
is  not  a  member  of  their  church  to  the  Communion,  nor 
their  children  to  baptism  ;  yet  they  will  marry  their  chil- 
dren to  those  whom  they  will  not  admit  to  baptism,  if 
they  be  rich. 

"  They  have  put  many  Quakers  to  death  of  other  pro- 
vinces. First  they  banished  them  as  Quakers  upon  pain 
of  death,  and  then  executed  them  for  returning.  They 
have  beaten  some  to  jelly  and  been  other  ways  exceed- 
ing cruel  to  others.  .  .  .  Amongst  other  laws,  whoever 
keeps  Christmas  day  is  to  pay  five  pounds. 

"  They  hope  by  waiting  to  tire  the  king,  the  lord  chan- 
cellor and  the  secretaries  too ;  seven  years  they  can 
easily  spin  out  by  writing,  and  before  that  time  a  change 
may  come.  On  September  10,  1664,  they  published  by 
order  of  Court  a  paper  to  deter  and  frighten  all  from 
making  any  complaint  to  the  Commissioners." 

These  acts  of  the  Bostonians  did  not  all  apply  to 
New  Hampshire,  but  many  of  them  did,  and  they 
were  very  anxious  not  to  have  their  authority  in  that 
Colony  or  in  Maine  questioned.  For  circulating  a 
petition  to  the  king  signed  by  several  respectable 
citizens  of  New  Hampshire,  asking  for  a  separate 
government,  the   Massachusetts   authorities,  Dan- 


64  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

forth,  Lusher,  and  Leverett,  caused  Abraham  Cor- 
bet of  Portsmouth  to  be  sent  to  prison  in  Boston. 
While  there,  Sir  Robert  Carr  of  the  Commission 
went  to  see  him  and  to  find  bail  for  him,  and  was 
then  (December,  1665)  presented  with  a  petition 
from  John  Hoar,  ancestor  of  Senator  Hoar,  com- 
plaining of  injustice  in  the  Puritan  courts.  For  this 
Mr.  Hoar  was  fined  .£50.  The  commissioners  were 
unable  to  effect  anything  important  by  their  au- 
thority, and  they  were  recalled  by  King  Charles  in 
1666,  with  directions  to  the  Bostonians  to  send  over 
agents  to  England,  to  present  their  case  to  the  Lords 
of  Trade  and  Plantations,  who  then  had  succeeded 
to  Laud's  commission  of  1634.  It  then  appeared 
that  one  object  which  the  king  had  at  heart  was  to 
revive  the  claims  of  Mason's  heirs  to  New  Hamp- 
shire ;  and  as  this  was  a  chief  occasion  of  the  final 
establishment  of  that  Colony  as  a  royal  province,  it 
becomes  important  to  tell  the  story  of  these  claims, 
which  kept  the  courts,  the  people,  and  the  Legisla- 
ture of  New  Hampshire  busy  and  troubled  for  more 
than  a  hundred  years. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE   MASONIAN   CLAIMS 

At  the  death  of  Captain  Mason  in  1635,  he  left 
his  New  England  property  to  his  wife,  and  ulti- 
mately to  his  grandson,  then  an  infant,  upon  his 
taking  the  name  of  Mason,  instead  of  his  baptismal 
name  of  Tufton.  Mrs.  Anne  Mason  died  in  1654, 
and  in  1655,  upon  coming  of  age,  Robert  Mason 
administered  upon  her  estate  and  began  to  form 
hopes  of  profit  from  his  grandfather's  expenditure 
and  grants  in  New  England.  In  1659  he  petitioned 
Parliament  for  relief,  and  in  1660  petitioned,  as  al- 
ready mentioned,  in  concert  with  others,  to  have  the 
affair  referred  to  a  committee  for  information,  which 
committee  reported  in  favor  of  Mason's  claim. 
Thereupon  the  New  England  Commissioners  were 
directed  to  examine  into  the  claims  of  Mason  in 
New  Hampshire  ;  and  they  partially  heard  his  case 
at  Portsmouth,  deciding  only  that  Massachusetts 
had  no  rightful  authority  there.  Encouraged  by 
this,  Joseph  Mason,  then  about  seventy,  and  pre- 
paring to  return  to  England,  left  the  care  of  the 
lands  and  rights  to  Nicholas  Shapleigh,  whom  Colo- 
nel Nichols  made  attorney  for  Robert  Mason  ;  and 


66  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

Shapleigh  began  to  lease  lands  in  the  Colony  to 
his  political  friends,  among  them  Dr.  Barefoot.  In 
writing  to  his  kinsman  liobert,  Joseph  Mason,  in 
1667,  said  that  he  knew  from  Major  Pike  of  Salis- 
bury that  the  Massachusetts  magistrates  were  will- 
ing to  restore  to  Mason  his  right  of  lands,  adding, 
"  Pilie  would  take  pains  to  be  one  of  three  to  end 
this  rupture."  This  indicates  that  moderate  men  in 
Massachusetts  did  not  dispute  Mason's  equitable 
claim.  But  Joseph  Mason  added,  "  Nothing  must 
be  conceded  to  those  men  of  the  best  estate  at 
Portsmouth  [the  Cutts,  Pendletons,  Fryar,  and 
Stileman],  for  they  would  only  confirm  themselves 
in  their  own  grants  of  land,  which  they  have  given 
to  one  another  by  the  waterside,  where  100  acres 
are  worth  1000  farther  inland."  This  year  (1667) 
he  says  two  friends  of  Mason,  Edward  Hilton  of 
Exeter  and  Walter  Barefoot  of  Dover,  have  taken 
two  tracts  of  land  on  Lampereel  River,  "  reserving 
a  yearly  rent  to  the  Lord  Proprietor,"  Mason.  The 
transaction  brings  Barefoot  in  for  the  first  time  as 
a  Masonian  champion,  but  the  date  is  thrown  back 
a  year  earlier  by  one  Captain  John  Littlebury,  who 
wrote  the  Massachusetts  authorities  that  he  was 
once  governor  of  Holy  Island,  near  Berwick  on  the 
Scotch  coast,  and  that  in  1666  he  had  been  injured 
by  Barefoot  and  Shapleigh  in  a  land  deal.  The 
letter  is  dated  in  1669,  and  alleges  :  — 

"  In  1631  he  had  paid  300  pounds  to  John  Mason 
and  his  associates  in  colonizing  New  Hampshire,  Griffith 


THE  MASONIAN  CLAIMS  67 

Gavdnev  and  Thomas  Eyres,  as  an  adventure  there  :  for 
which,  in  1663,  the  survivors,  Gardner  and  Eyres,  had 
agreed  to  give  him  a  fourth  part  of  their  property,  —  his 
])romised  share  heing  6000  acres  ;  but  now  he  hath  been 
deluded  three  years,  to  his  great  hindrance  and  damage, 
by  Captain  Champernoon,  Major  Shapleigh,  Dr.  Bare- 
foot, and  other  grand  incendiaries  to  the  present  govern- 
ment [that  is,  of  Massachusetts],  and  that  Shapleigh  hath 
lately  made  leases  of  lands  for  1000  years  to  Mr.  Hilton 
of  Exeter,  Dr.  Barefoot,  and  others."  ^ 

^  This  is  perhaps  the  only  appearance  of  this  Holy  Island  Cap- 
tain in  New  England  story,  where  captains  are  so  numerous.  It 
looks  as  if  he  was  a  genuine  sufferer  by  a  land  speculation ;  for 
who  would  have  invented  a  tale  of  a  Scotch  captain  appealing  to 
Massachusetts  for  redress  ?  Perhaps  this  appeal  throws  light  on 
the  relation  of  David  Thomson,  also  a  Scot,  to  Captain  Mason  and 
the  Little  Harbor  settlement  of  162o,  which  seems  to  have  been 
Mason's  affair ;  yet  Thomson  had  a  patent  for  GOOO  acres  of  land 
and  an  island,  belonging  to  some  citizens  of  Plymouth,  and  granted 
in  1622.  Can  the  island  have  been  Great  Island,  now  New  Castle, 
and  did  the  Plymouth  proprietors  make  it  over  to  Mason,  while 
Thomson  was  yet  a  resident  at  Little  Harbor,  just  across  a  ferry 
from  Great  Island  ?  The  indenture  is  between  David  Thomson, 
Abraham  Colmer,  Nicholas  Sherwill,  and  Leonard  Pomery, —  the 
last  three  living  in  Plymouth  as  late  as  IHoO.  Cotton  Mather 
says  that  his  father,  when  at  Plymouth,  England,  in  1602,  heard 
"  from  Mr.  Sherwill,"  a  minister  there,  that  his  grandfather  and 
two  others  "had  a  patent  for  that  which  Mr.  Mason  pretended 
nnto  at  Pascataqua."  In  the  Public  Record  Office  at  London  there 
is  mention  under  the  year  1622,  "  of  a  patent  to  David  Thomson, 
M.  Jobe,  M.  Sherwood  of  Plymouth,  for  a  part  of  Piscattowa  River 
in  New  England."  This,  except  the  blundering  names,  agrees 
with  Mather's  story.  I  conclude  Thomson  was  either  an  agent  for 
Mason,  or  sold  out  the  6000  acres  to  him,  —  reserving  his  indefi- 
nite island,  but  tiirning  over  Great  Island  to  Mason,  while  fixing 
on   Thomson's  Island   in   Boston  Bay  for  his  own.    This  theory 


68  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

From  this  time  until  the  death  of  Robert  Mason, 
wliile  accompanying  Sir  Edmund  Andros,  of  whose 
Council  he  was,  to  Albany  in  September,  1688,  the 
claims  of  that  family  were  an  occasion  for  disturb- 
ance in  Massachusetts  and  New  Hampshire.  Josejah 
Mason's  fair  offer,  in  1653,  to  have  the  claims  set- 
tled by  inquiry  and  arbitration,  was  neglected  by 
the  General  Court,  to  whom  he  made  it,  and  this 
dispute  went  on  to  the  bitter  end,  resulting  in  the 
dispossession  of  Massachusetts  from  the  control  of 
New  Hampshire  in  1679,  and  in  the  loss  of  Boston's 
idolized  charter,  as  Maverick  had  foretold,  in  1686. 
In  canceling  that  charter,  James  II  put  into  the 
Council  for  governing  all  New  England  and  New 
York  Robert  Mason  and  his  cousin,  Edward  Ran- 
dolph, and  also  Francis  Champernowui,  John  Usherj 
and  Jonathan  Tyng,  all  favorable  to  Mason's  claims. 
In  spite  of  this,  the  speedy  overthrow  of  Andros's 
government,  and  the  stout  resistance  of  the  New 
Hampshire  yeomanry  to  the  demand  of  Mason  for 
rents,  made  the  pecuniary  result  to  Mason  and  his 
heirs  very  small,  and  its  obtaining  difficult  and 
vexatious.  Robert  Mason  seems  to  have  been  a 
person  of  gentle,  even  weak  character,  always  in 
debt,  and  depending  much  for  the  support  of  his 
cause  on  the  more  aggressive  and  persistent  Ran- 
doljjh,  his  kinsman,  and  the  shifty  and  courageous 
Barefoot,  his  friend  in  New  Hampshire. 

makes  Tlionison  a  jjart  of  Mason's  testimony  to  the  truth  of  his 
claim. 


THE  MASONIAN  CLAIMS  69 

The  claim  of  John  Mason  was  well  founded,  and 
has  had  small  justice  allowed  it  by  the  Massachu- 
setts historians  and  scholars.  It  came  into  conflict 
with  the  practical  rights  of  the  hardy  planters  who 
had  settled  on  Mason's  lands,  and  earned  by  toil 
their  right  to  be  exempt  from  rack-rent.  There,  of 
course,  it  failed  and  fell ;  but  when  it  conflicted,  as 
it  did,  with  the  assumptions  and  encroachments  of 
rich  merchants  and  powerful  landlords,  like  Rich- 
ard Cutt,  Richard  Waldrou,  and  other  members 
of  the  Puritan  oligarchy  in  New  England,  equity 
was  often  on  the  side  of  the  Mason  family.  Walter 
Barefoot  and  the  Hiltons,  with  all  their  affection 
for  the  Church  of  England  and  the  Stuart  family, 
were  not  ill  friends  to  the  poor  and  persecuted  in 
New  Hampshire ;  and  Barefoot,  with  his  oaths,  his 
brawls,  and  his  land  deals,  gives  a  flavor  of  English 
good  humor  to  the  otherwise  insipid  annals  of  par- 
ish squabbles  and  litigious  controversy.  It  is  droll 
to  see  how  persistently  the  Massachusetts  Puritans 
connected  bigamy  and  the  desertion  of  English 
wives  with  difference  of  religious  opinion.  If  a  Sir 
Christopher  Gardiner  shows  himself  near  Boston, 
or  a  reckless  Tom  Morton  plays  the  mischief  at 
Merry  Mount,  he  must  needs  have  deserted  a  wife 
in  Britain  or  France.  So,  too,  with  Walter  Bare- 
foot. So  long  as  he  lived  peaceably  with  the  Wig- 
gin  family,  and  practiced  medicine  successfully  in 
Dover,  he  was  not  censured.  But  when  he  became 
troublesome  to  the  Lords  Brethren  in  Boston,  by 


70  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

setting  Quaker  women  free  or  getting  the  better 
of  a  kinsman  of  the  Wiuthrops  in  a  land  sijecula- 
tion,  Barefoot  was  a  candidate  for  bigamy,  and  a 
swearer  of  round  and  horrid  oaths.  Having  got 
into  controversy  with  the  Puritan  magnates,  it  was 
(1671)  reported  that  he  had  deserted  a  wife  in 
England  ;  and  in  March,  1676,  when  he  and  Ran- 
dolph were  beginning  their  long  assault  on  the 
Massachusetts  Cliarter,  the  required  evidence  was 
furnished  by  a  convenient  deponent,  one  Davis,  who 
testified :  — 

"  That  in  the  year  1662,  being  in  England,  there  came 
to  my  lodging  a  woman  who  said  she  was  the  wife  of  one 
Walter  Barefoot,  who  was,  as  she  said,  in  New  England. 
She  complained  she  was  in  a  very  low  condition,  and  de- 
sired nie  to  endeavor  to  get  him  to  send  her  some  mainte- 
nance ;  for  slie  had  not  received  anything  from  him,  and 
she  had  two  children  to  maintain,  and  had  no  subsist- 
ence for  them.  Further,  there  came  an  ancient  man  to 
me,  who  inquired  if  I  knew  one  Walter  Barefoot  in  New 
England.  I  told  him  I  did.  He  said,  he  was  a  very  knave, 
in  tliat,  desiring  him  to  be  security  for  him  to  a  merchant 
in  Mark  Lane  (as  I  remember)  for  linens  he  had  of  him, 
promising  to  send  pay  for  the  same,  but  never  did ;  so 
that  the  old  man  was  forced  to  lie  in  the  King's  Bench ; 
he  was  then  a  pi'isoner,  as  he  said.  These  things  I 
acquainted  Mr.  Barefoot  with  when  I  came  over ;  who 
owned  the  linens  he  had  taken  up.  And  as  to  his  wife, 
I  do  not  remember  he  disowned  her;  though,  it  being 
so  many  years  since,  I  cannot  speak  expressly  to  it."  ^ 

1  Byron,  in  the  fifth  canto  of  Don  Juan,  intioduces  an  English- 


THE  MASONIAN  CLAIMS  71 

Whatever  bis  English  experience  had  been,  — 
and  on  that  point  we  have  little  information,  — 
Dr.  Barefoot  was  a  thorn  in  the  flesh  to  the  Puri- 
tans in  their  domination  over  New  Hampshire  and 
Maine.  His  friend  and  professional  brother.  Dr. 
Henry  Greenland  of  Newbury  and  Kittery,  was 
also  very  troublesome ;  but  he  was  more  easily  dis- 
posed of  than  Dr.  Barefoot,  after  a  career  of  chi- 
rurgery,  speculation,  and  polities.  Greenland  had 
come  over  from  England  in  1662,  five  years  after 
Barefoot,  and  partly  by  reason  of  his  acquaintance  ; 
he  lived  in  Newbury,  near  the  Merrimac,  until 
1666,  when  he  went  to  Kittery,  and  joined  Bare- 
foot in  some  of  his  business.  He  also  took  part 
with  him  in  favoring  the  claims  of  Mason,  and 
opposing  the  wealthy  Cutt  brothers,  one  of  whom 
he  plotted  to  have  seized  and  carried  over  to  Eng- 
land, in  1670,  as  a  traitor  to  King  Charles.  There 
had  been  a  quarrel  a  few  years  earlier  about  hot 
words  spoken  by  Richard  Cutt  against  the  royal 
commissioners,  to  which  Dr.  Greenland  had  given 

man  of  the  Morton  and  Barefoot  type,  who,  explaining  himself  to 
Juan, says : — 

"  I  cried  upon  my  first  wife's  dying  day, 
And  also  when  mj'  second  ran  away  : 

'  Well,  then,  your  third,'  said  Juan,  'what  did  she? 

She  did  not  run  away  too,  did  she,  sir  ?  ' 
'  No,  faith.'     '  What  then  ?  '     'I  ran  away  from  her.'  " 

Barefoot  in  his  will,  while  leaving  a  larg'e  estate,  and  remember- 
ing his  English  cousin,  John  Lee  of  Chadwell  St.  Mary's,  near  Lon- 
don, says  nothing  of  any  wife  or  children  in  England.  This  was 
in  1688. 


72  NEW    HAMPSHIRE 

testimony ;  and  one  of  the  final  transactions  of 
Cartwright,  Carr,  and  Maverick  in  Portsmouth  in 
July,  1665,  was  to  leave  on  record  these  singular 
papers :  — 

(By  Maverick.)  "  Whereas  there  is  a  report  given 
out  that  I  should  return  the  name  of  Mr.  Richard  Cutt 
unto  my  Lord  Chancellor,  among  those  which  I  conceive 
to  be  rebellious,  —  I  confess,  on  his  being  accused  for 
some  words  tending  that  way,  I  intended  so  to  have 
done ;  but  on  better  information  and  consideration,  I  see 
no  just  cause  for  it,  nor  have  I  done  it." 

(By  the  three  Commissioners.)  "We  do  hereby 
testify  that  we  do  freely  forgive  Mr.  Richard  Cutt  of 
Portsmouth,  concerning  any  injury  which  he  might  be 
supposed  to  have  done  us  by  some  words  which  he  was 
accused  to  have  spoken  against  the  King's  Commission- 
ers (about  having  a  dagger  put  into  their  bellies  or  guts) 
or  words  to  the  like  purpose.  And  if  the  said  Cutt  never 
molest  Thomas  Wiggin  of  Dover,  or  Dr.  Greenland  of 
Newbury,  for  giving  in  evidence  against  him,  or  for  re- 
porting him  to  be  the  author  of  such  words,  we  promise 
never  to  produce  those  writings  and  evidences  which 
they  have  sworn  to  before  us,  to  his  hurt  or  damage.  In 
witness  whereof  I  have  hereunto  set  my  hand  and  seal 
this  17th  day  of  July,  1665,  George  Cartwright. 
Do.  do.  set  my  hand  and  seal  this  24th  day  of  July, 
1665,  Robert  Carr.  Do.  do.  set  my  hand  and  seal  this 
24th  day  of  July,  1665,  Samuel  Maverick." 

When  it  is  rememhered  that  this  younger  Wig- 
gin  was  the  brother-in-law  of  Barefoot,  and  Green- 
land his  intimate  friend,  it  will  easily  be  inferred 


THE   MASONIAN   CLAIMS  73 

how  warm  had  been  the  controversy  between  the 
advocates  of  Mason  and  tlie  men  who  were  living 
on  his  alleged  property  at  Pascataqua.  In  spite  of 
this  reconciliation,  the  quarrel  was  revived  in  1670— 
72,  and  it  was  this,  with  Greenland's  ill  conduct 
in  other  ways,  which  led  to  his  banishment  from 
Maine  in  1673.  The  decree  was  made  the  year  be- 
fore, but  he  was  allowed  until  September  1,  1673,  to 
depart.  He  sold  his  possessions  in  Kittery,  partly 
to  Barefoot,  and  removed  to  New  Jersey,  where 
he  was  living  at  Barefoot's  death  in  1689.  In  1671 
Barefoot  himself  was  sentenced  by  the  vindictive 
Massachusetts  magistrates  for  his  "  profaneness  and 
horrid  oaths,"  and  they  went  on  to  say :  "  It  ap- 
pearing that  he  left  a  wife  and  two  children  in 
England,  we  do  sentence  him  to  return  forthwith 
to  England  by  the  next  ship ;  and  that  he  shall 
henceforth  be  debarred  to  practice  chirurgery  or 
physic  in  any  part  of  this  jurisdiction." 

In  spite  of  this  severity  toward  the  friends  of 
Mason,  and  the  constant  protest  of  Massachusetts 
that  he  had  no  rights  in  their  New  Hampshire,  and 
that  the  Bostoners,  as  Mason  called  them,  had  just 
and  absolute  control  there,  these  claims  would  not 
rest  quiet.  They  had  two  foundations,  —  a  series 
of  grants  from  Charles  I  directly  or  tlirough  the 
New  England  Company,  which  were  just  as  valid 
as  the  Massachusetts  Charter,  and  no  more  so  ;  and 
the  settlement  of  a  part  of  the  tracts  granted,  by 
servants  and  partners  of  Mason,  and  a  large  out- 


74  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

lay  of  money  in  effecting  that.  The  Massachusetts 
Puritans  and  their  partisans  in  New  Hampshire 
and  Maine  had  expended  more  money,  and  had 
held  on  to  their  colonies,  but  their  legal  and  equita- 
ble right  was  no  better  than  John  Mason's,  whose 
heirs  had  the  Crown  of  England  on  their  side.  But 
against  them  was  the  steady,  sturdy  belief  of  the 
mass  of  the  New  Hampshire  planters,  men  of  toil 
and  thought,  who,  as  Emerson  said  of  the  embat- 
tled farmers  of  Concord,  "  supposed  they  had  a 
right  to  their  corn  and  their  cattle,  without  paying 
tribute  to  any  but  their  own  governors."  They  had 
not  profited  by  the  outlay  of  John  Mason ;  they 
were  not  stripping  his  woodlands  or  defrauding  him 
of  what  he  had  bought  and  paid  for.  They  had 
brought  their  own  lands  from  a  wilderness  condition 
to  a  garden  fertility  ;  they  had  encountei'ed  summer 
heat  and  winter  cold,  while  the  Masons  were  living 
easily  in  London,  and  enjoying  the  sunshine  of 
Court  favor.  So  they  resisted  the  payment  of  quit- 
rent,  and  thereby  made  New  England  measurably 
free  from  the  evil  of  a  land  tenure  such  as  kept 
Ireland  in  poverty  and  strife,  and  separated  the 
idle  from  the  laborious  caste  in  most  European 
countries,  to  the  manifest  harm  of  both.  A  Mas- 
sachusetts scholar,  with  that  bias  against  Mason 
and  for  the  Puritans  which  has  so  much  warped 
the  truth  of  New  England  history,^  thought  that  a 

1  Mr.  Charles  Deane,  in  Proceedings  of  the  Massachusetts  His- 
torical Society,  for  May,  1870.    The  researches  of  this  gentleman, 


THE   MASONIAN   CLAIMS  75 

recognition  of  Robert  Mason's  claim  to  the  New 
Hampshire  lauds,  "  fostered  by  a  government  un- 
friendly to  the  liberties  of  its  subjects,  was  one  of 
the  greatest  misfortunes  that  could  have  befallen 
the  settlers  on  the  soil ;  a  prolific  source  of  annoy- 
ance, which  continued  for  over  a  century."  But 
this  claim  resisted  and  defeated  was  of  great  bene- 
fit to  them  in  the  maintenance  and  development  of 
their  free  commonwealth.  It  united  them  in  a 
cause  easy  to  understand,  gave  them  confidence  in 
each  other,  an  invincible  self-reliance,  and  enabled 
them  to  make  head  against  the  bigotries  of  Mas- 
sachusetts, as  well  as  the  usurpations  of  English 
landlords  and  governors.  AVhen  the  more  serious 
crisis  of  the  Revolution  in  1775  came,  they  knew 
exactly  what  to  do,  and  they  went  resolutely  for- 
ward to  do  it.  Both  then  and  in  the  earlier  troubles 
of  the  Stuart  regime,  worthy  individuals  suffered 
hardship,  and  property  rights  were  too  much  dis- 
regarded, but  the  final  issue  was  worth  the  cost. 
In  certain  ways  Massachusetts  was  hardly  less  un- 
friendly to  the  liberties  of  the  people,  especially  on 
the  religious  side,  than  were  Laud  and  the  Stuarts  ; 
and  it  is  the  glory  of  New  Hampshire  that  both 
were  stiffly  resisted. 

Edward    Randolph,  whose  tart    and  unamiable 
character  will  sufficiently  appear,  was  a  good  friend 

in  regard  to  David  Thomson  and  his  English  partners,  have  been 
careful  and  useful ;  but  he  carried  a  natural  skepticism  rather 
too  far  in  his  inferences  and  denial  of  inference. 


76  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

to  his  kinsman,  Robert  Mason,  and  gave  him  bet- 
ter advice  than  he  was  always  willing  to  follow. 
After  the  failui-e  of  Cranfield's  efforts  to  maintain 
Mason's  claims,  in  which  he,  as  governor,  had  a 
pecuniary  interest,  Randolph,  in  the  autumn  of 
1685,  was  made  postmaster  for  New  England.  He 
then  wrote  to  a  friend  :  "  What  profit  arises  I  de- 
sign to  Mr.  Mason's  young  children  in  England.  I 
allow  them  now  <£20  a  year,  till  his  better  fortunes 
will  afford  them  a  larger  supply.  I  shall  not  be 
wanting  to  do  him  and  his  all  the  service  that  lies 
in  my  power ;  being  very  unwilling  to  think  he 
should  be  obliged  to  come  for  England,  to  be  ex- 
posed to  his  merciless  creditors."  A  little  earlier 
Randolph  had  reported  to  another  friend  (October, 
1685):  — 

"  Last  week  Mr.  Blaitliwait^  was  proposing  that  Mr. 
Mason  should  quit  his  pretensions  in  New  England,  and 
lay  all  at  His  Majesty's  [James  Second's]  feet,  upon  His 
Majesty's  making  him  governor  of  Bermuda,  and  allow- 
ing to  him  and  his  heirs  two  or  three  hundred  pounds 
yearly,  forever ;  to  be  paid  out  of  the  quitrents  which 
will,  in  a  short  time,  arise  upon  this  settlement.  For 
the  people  will  ratlier  pay  to  His  Majesty  sixpence  an 
acre,  than  one  farthing  to  Mr.  Mason.  I  fear  his  grants 
will  hardly  hold  out  upon  a  trial  at  the  Council  board. 

^  Mr.  Blaitliwait  was  the  long'-standhig  and  well-skilled  clerk 
in  the  Plantation  Office  at  London,  who  took  the  money  of  appli- 
cants, and  favored  or  opposed  them  according  to  the  sum  paid,  or 
party  interests  at  the  time. 


THE   MASONIAN   CLAIMS  77 

He  is  sure  of  all  assistance  from  the  plantation  office ; 
but  his  enemies  have  the  larger  purse." 

Randolph  was  wise  in  this  suggestion,  and  it  was 
well  for  New  England  that  Mason  did  not  accept 
it.  Fastened  upon  the  jjlanters  in  the  form  of  royal 
quitrents,  the  claim  would  have  been  shaken  off 
with  difficulty,  upon  the  accession  of  William  III, 
who  was  easily  persuaded  to  continue  New  Hamp- 
shire as  a  province,  in  order  that  Allen,  wdio  had 
purchased  the  claim  in  part,  might  realize  money 
fi'om  it. 

The  English  judges,  wdio  in  1677  ruled  in  favor 
of  Mason  as  against  Massachusetts,  were  tender  of 
the  rights  of  the  planters,  whom  they  styled  "  terre- 
tenants."  Their  title  must  be  tried  by  juries  "  upon 
the  place,"'  in  accordance  with  ancient  English  law^ ; 
and  this  decision,  when  fairly  carried  out,  gave  the 
planters  their  case.  A  land-tenure  held  for  the 
benefit  of  absentee  landlords  in  England  could  not 
appeal  to  a  jury  of  colonists  living  on  their  own 
acres.  Those  acres  they  held  by  the  hard  tenure  of 
toil  unceasing,  and  military  service  against  a  savage 
and  treacherous  foeman.  Were  they  to  pay  rent 
upon  the  graves  of  their  slaughtered  children,  bur- 
ied within  sight  of  their  roof  tree,  that  the  Indian 
might  not  unbury  and  mutilate  their  bodies  ?  Must 
they  deny  themselves  the  better  house  in  frozen 
winters,  or  a  bedstead  for  wife  and  daughter,  that 
silver  might  be  sent  across  the  ocean  to  the  dainty 
revelers   in    London    palaces  ?    Pleas    like    these. 


78  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

unspoken  but  keenly  felt,  moved  every  juryman 
who  had  not  been  bought  to  stand  by  the  cause  of 
his  neighbors,  which  was  also  his  own. 

On  two  separate  occasions  the  Mason  claim  to 
the  ownership  of  New  Hampshire  had  much  to  do 
with  preserving  the  Colony  from  being  swallowed 
up  in  Massachusetts,  —  in  1676-79,  when  the  inter- 
est of  the  heirs  added  to  the  resolute  purpose  of 
Charles  II  to  humiliate  Massachusetts  ;  and  again 
in  1690-92,  when  Samuel  Allen,  who  had  bought  a 
controlling  share  in  the  claims,  prevailed  on  Wil- 
liam III  to  let  the  decision  of  his  Uncle  Charles 
stand,  and  New  Hampshire  remain  a  royal  Province 
by  itself,  though  joined  with  Massachusetts  in  exec- 
utive government.  On  both  occasions  the  majority 
of  the  residents  would  probably  have  voted  to  unite 
with  the  Puritan  colony,  —  at  the  first,  from  the 
experience  of  fairly  good  government  for  a  whole 
generation,  and  at  the  second  (1690-92),  from  dis- 
gust at  the  ineffective  tyranny  of  the  royal  govern- 
ors and  council.  One  of  this  council  was  Mason 
himself,  who,  as  Chalmers  says,  "  was  placed  at  the 
head  of  the  provincial  Council,  and  was  enabled  to 
choose  two  burgesses  to  the  Assembly."  His  feeble 
character  made  this  opportunity  practically  useless 
to  him.  Chalmers,  in  1782,  who  had  access  to  ori- 
ginal papers  long  withheld  from  American  histo- 
rians, but  was  prejudiced  against  colonial  rights, 
states  the  case  fairly  enough  when  he  says  :  "  The 
New  Hampshire  planters  had  an  equitable,  Mason 


THE  MASONIAN  CLAIMS  79 

a  legal  right ;  "  but  he  adds,  with  a  Tory  sneer, 
that  these  planters  "  were  animated  by  principles 
which  never  recede,  because  they  claim  the  gifts 
of  society  as  the  rights  of  Nature."  In  their  case 
they  made  the  society  which  had  gifts  to  bestow, 
and  they  had  subdued  that  rude  nature  which  lay 
wild  about  them.  At  the  date  when  they  won  their 
first  victory  over  the  claims  of  Mason,  they  num- 
bered hardly  more  than  four  thousand.  In  1671, 
when  Mason  was  urging  his  claim  in  London,  he 
had  written,  with  substantial  truth,  though  in  too 
optimistic  a  tone  :  — 

"New  Hampshire  is  a  place  the  best  improved  for 
land,  and  most  populated  of  any  in  those  parts  ;  abound- 
ing plentifully  with  corn,  cattle,  timber  and  fish  ;  and 
the  people  live  generally  very  comfortably  and  happy  ; 
having  a  great  trade  to  all  parts,  and  store  of  ship^jing 
at  their  town,  Portsmouth,  which  exports  and  imports 
yearly  some  thousands  of  tons  of  goods,  of  their  own 
growth  and  foreign.  Goods  exported  yearly  are,  20,000 
tons  of  deals  and  pipestaves,  10.000  quintals  of  fish, 
ten  shiploads  of  masts,  and  several  tliousand  of  beaver 
and  otter  skins.  The  imports  are,  300  tons  of  wine  and 
brandy,  200  tons  of  goods  from  the  Leeward  Islands, 
and  2000  tons  of  salt." 

This  former  happy  condition  is  confirmed  in  a 
letter  of  a  dozen  years  later,  written  by  Simon 
Bradstreet  to  Randolph,  complaining  of  the  effect 
of  Cranfield's  tyranny  (December  8,  1684). 


80  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

"  It  is  no  small  grief  to  us  in  Massachusetts  to  hear 
and  see  the  miserable  condition  of  our  neighbors  in  New 
Hampshire  ;  once  a  hopeful  and  flourishing  plantation, 
but  now  in  a  manner  undone,  —  no  face  of  trade,  nor 
care  for  anything  else,  their  own  vessels  being  afraid  to 
come  into  their  own  ports,  as  some  of  them  have  declared 
unto  myself.  This  makes  our  people  dread  tlie  like  con- 
dition." 

It  must  be  remembered  that  in  the  interval  be- 
tween 1671  and  1684  the  serious  Indian  war  of 
King  Philip  had  occurred,  and  New  Hampshire  had 
suffered  heavily  by  it,  like  the  rest  of  New  Eng- 
land. It  was  this  which  gave  peculiar  sting  to  the 
exaction  of  rent  demanded  by  Mason.  Neither  he 
nor  his  family  had  done  anything,  for  more  than 
forty  years,  to  benefit  the  planters,  while  the  Bos- 
ton Puritans  had  lent  a  helping  hand  to  those  of 
their  own  faith,  both  in  peace  and  war.  This  was 
strongly  set  forth  in  1680  by  William  Vaughan,  a 
connection  of  the  Cutt  family,  and  a  pupil  of  Sir 
Josiah  Child,  the  English  financier,  who  thus  replied 
to  Mason  in  a  letter  to  Charles  II :  — 

"  Mr.  Mason  has  not  obeyed  the  conditions  of  his  grant, 
viz.  the  peopling  of  the  place  and  enlargement  of  your 
dominions,  —  both  of  which  have  been  vigorously  in- 
tended by  the  present  inhabitants.  The  '  vast  expense 
of  his  estate  '  is  mostly  if  not  entirely  pretence.  .  .  . 
We  were  possessed  of  the  soil  long  before  Massachu- 
setts meddled  with  us :  indeed,  we  invited  Massachusetts 


THE  MASONIAN   CLAIMS  81 

to  govern  us,  to  prevent  the  confusion  of  anarchy.  We 
could  not  govern  ourselves  ;  and,  being  under  their  gov- 
ernment, used  their  system  of  allotting  lands,  but  never 
tliought  of  deriving  any  propriety  from  them  in  those 
lands  which,  under  you  and  your  ro3'al  predecessors, 
were  accounted  our  own.  Instead  of  the  final  expulsion 
by  Massachusetts  alleged  by  Mr.  Mason,  we  can  plenti- 
fully prove  that  the  undertaking  was  slighted  and  the 
whole  place  deserted  both  by  Capt.  John  Mason  and  his 
agents,  many  years  before  Massachusetts  was  concerned 
therein." 

This  also  is  a  partisan  statement,  but  with  much 
truth  in  it.  It  was  a  favorite  notion  of  the  Bos- 
ton Puritans  that  New  Hampshire  could  not  get 
along  without  them.  Four  of  them  in  May,  1691 
(Henry  Ashurst,  Increase  Mather,  Elisha  Cooke, 
and  Thomas  Oakes),  joined  in  a  letter  to  influence 
the  inclusion  of  the  northern  colony  in  the  new  Mas- 
sachusetts charter,  and  said  :  — 

"  The  people  date  their  ruin  from  the  time  when  New 
Hampshire  was  separated  from  Massachusetts.  It  will 
be  no  one's  interest  to  make  New  Hampshire  a  distinct 
government  now  ;  as  it  cannot  pay  the  expenses  nor  de- 
fend itself.  If  every  grant  were  held  to  imply  distinct 
rights  to  govern,  there  would  be  more  governors  than 
towns  in  that  province." 

These  conflicting  statements  have  been  disposed 
of  by  the  course  of  history.  The  small  province 
was  not  ruined;  it  got  its  separate  government, 


82  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

rather  against  its  own  wish,  paid  its  frugal  ex- 
penses, defended  itself,  and  helped  defend  Maine 
and  Massachusetts,  and  escaped  the  extreme  reli- 
gious intolerance  of  the  Puritans,  without  falling 
under  Episcopacy. 


CHAPTER  IV 

NEW    HAMPSHIRE    A    PROVINCE 

What  the  Masons  and  Godfreys,  the  Shapleighs 
and  Champernowns,  had  been  trying  for  fifteen 
years  to  effect  —  the  separation  of  New  Hampshire 
from  Puritan  domination,  at  least  outwardly — was 
brought  about  in  two  or  three  years  by  the  more 
energetic  action  of  Edward  Randolph,  wlio,  from 
1676,  for  thirteen  years,  was  the  spirit  within  the 
wheels  that  moved  the  clumsy  colonial  administra- 
tion of  the  Stuarts  and  their  councilors.  After  his 
defeat  and  expulsion  from  New  England  at  the 
downfall  of  Sir  Edmund  Andros,  and  when  he  was 
pestering  the  colonial  governors  of  Maryland  and 
Virginia,  Colonel  Copley,  then  governing  Mary- 
land, said  of  him  :  "  With  his  exorbitant  and  malig- 
nant temper,  he  has  done  here  what  he  has  done 
elsewhere,  —  made  the  country  weary  of  him.  He 
says  he  has  lived  for  five  and  twenty  years  on  the 
curses  of  the  people  ;  and  I  am  sure  he  never  lacks 
them."  This  was  his  reputation  in  New  England, 
but  he  did  not  wholly  deserve  it,  bitter  as  his  ani- 
mosity became  toward  the  colonial  officials. 

Randolph  was  the  son  of  an  Englishman  of  the 


84  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

same  name,  who  studied  medicine  in  Oxford  and  at 
Padua,  and  practiced  it  in  Canterbury.  A  younger 
son,  Bernard  liandolph,  resided  and  traveled  long 
in  the  Levant,  half  a  century  after  young  John 
AVinthrop  and  his  friend,  Sir  Kenelui  Digby,  were 
there ;  and  he  w^rote  a  small  but  excellent  book 
about  those  islands  and  countries.  Edward,  the 
head  of  the  family  (born  in  1632,  died  about  1702), 
was  well  educated,  but  devoted  himself  to  an  active 
life  in  public  business.  Naturally  a  Tory  and 
loyalist,  he  profited  by  the  Restoration  to  gain  office, 
though  never  so  well  placed  as  he  thought  he  de- 
served ;  and,  being  akin  to  the  Mason  family,  he 
took  the  view  they  had  held  for  many  years  about 
the  Massachusetts  colonists  and  their  political  am- 
bitions. Being  sent  over  to  Boston  and  Portsmouth 
on  a  special  mission  in  1676,  he  so  industriously 
collected  facts,  and  so  ingeniously  presented  them, 
that  he  soon  gave  the  Court  reason  to  constitute 
New  Hampshire  and  Maine  as  separate  govern- 
ments, while  prosecuting  its  main  purpose  of  an- 
nulling the  Massachusetts  charter,  with  that  of 
Connecticut,  and  ultimately  bringing  all  New  Eng- 
land under  a  governor-general,  such  as  Charles  I 
fancied  he  had  found  in  Sir  Ferdinando  Gorges. 

The  ground  had  been  prepared  for  Randolph's 
incessant  activity  and  complete  success,  so  far  as 
New  Hampshire  was  concerned,  by  the  petitions 
of  the  Masons  and  the  measures  of  the  convinced 
but  inefficient   royal   Commission  of  1664.     The 


NEW   HAMPSHIRE   A   PROVINCE  85 

plausible  answers  of  the  Massachusetts  oligarchy 
lost  their  effect  in  England  by  the  inconsistent 
deeds  which  accompanied  these  loyal  protestations. 
King  Charles  had  been  equally  inconsistent;  for 
after  showing  mercy  to  the  Quakers  in  New  Eng- 
land, he  had  allowed  them  to  be  cruelly  proceeded 
against  in  London ;  and  while  urging  liberty  of 
conscience  on  Endicott  and  Leverett  and  the  Bos- 
ton ministers,  he  had  been  mercilessly  persecuting 
Scotch  and  English  dissenters.  Randolph,  with  all 
his  virulence  against  the  Puritans,  had  juster  no- 
tions of  toleration  than  either  Charles  or  the  Mas- 
sachusetts bigots,  and  succeeded  in  forming  a  small 
party  of  moderates  in  the  New  England  colonies, 
among  whom  might  be  reckoned  Bradsti-eet,  Stough- 
ton,  Bulkeley,  and  Pike  in  Massachusetts,  Josiah 
Winslow  in  Plymouth,  and  John  Cutt  and  Walter 
Barefoot  in  New  Hampshire.^  He  was  at  first  san- 
guine of  easy  success  in  bringing  all  New  England 
to  submit  to  the  king,  and  to  make  Mason  rich  by 
the  rents  of  his  New  Hampshire  lands.  He  reached 
Boston  early  in  June,  1676 ;  and  though  treated 
with  some  incivility  by  the  Governor  and  a  part  of 
the  Council,  and  boldly  told  that  the  Colony  was 
not  bound  by  the  laws  of  England,  having  power 

^  It  may  be  thought  strang-e  that  Barefoot  is  reckoned  among' 
the  moderate  men ;  but  his  private  relations  with  the  Wi<;<;'in 
family,  and  his  business  dealings  in  the  three  colonies  of  Maine, 
New  Hampshire,  and  Massachusetts,  though  involving  him  in  law- 
suits, do  not  seem  to  have  destroyed  general  confidence  in  his 
judgment  and  good  nature.  His  true  career  is  yet  to  be  described. 


86  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

by  charter  to  make  its  own  laws,  and  that  charter 
having  been  confirmed  by  the  king  in  his  letter  of 
1662  ;  yet  Kandolph  found  so  many  loyalists  in 
Boston  that  he  went  cheerfully  on  to  Portsmouth 
in  July,  and  examined  the  situation  in  the  four 
towns  which  it  was  proposed  to  make  into  a  pro- 
vince, either  by  themselves  or  in  conjunction  with 
the  Maine  settlements.  Or  rather,  he  appears  to 
have  thought  that  Mason's  claim  to  the  whole  coun- 
try between  Salem  and  the  Pascataqua  would  be 
maintained  by  the  king ;  for  he  spoke  in  his  report 
of  a  territor}"^  "  belonging  to  Mr.  Mason,  but  now 
divided  by  the  Bostoners  into  three  counties,  Nor- 
folk, Suffolk,  and  Middlesex."  The  malcontent 
churchmen  and  Quakers  in  Dover,  Portsmouth,  and 
the  Maine  towns  complained  loudly  to  Randolph, 
alleging  that  they  had  no  religious  and  little  politi- 
cal freedom,  and  that  the  magistrates  sent  among 
them  from  Boston  to  try  suits  laid  what  fines  and 
taxes  they  saw  fit,  contraiy  to  English  law.  This 
was  partly  true,  but  did  not  amount  to  a  general 
grievance.  More  serious  was  the  menace  of  the 
Massachusetts  authorities  when  the  minority  in  the 
invaded  towns  wished  to  assert  their  loyalty  by  pe- 
tition to  the  king,  and  claimed  a  right  of  appeal  to 
their  sovereign,  which  the  Puritans  had  steadfastly 
denied. 

Returning  to  Boston  after  a  fortnight's  absence, 
he  found  his  reception  cooler,  and  even  hostile. 
Leverett,  then  Governor,  reproved  him  for  publish- 


NEW   HAMPSHIRE   A   PROVINCE  87 

ing  to  the  people  the  purpose  of  his  mission,  and 
stirring  up,  as  was  said,  mutiny  and  disturbance, 
withdrawing  the  people  from  their  obedience  to  the 
Massachusetts  magistrates.  Randolph  replied  that 
if  he  had  done  amiss,  complaint  should  be  made 
to  the  king,  who  would  do  justice.  This  did  not 
please  the  Puritans,  who,  upon  Randolph's  depar- 
ture for  England,  confidently  told  him  that  "  those 
who  blessed  them,  God  would  bless,  and  those  that 
cursed  them,  God  would  curse."  They  added  that 
"  whatever  reports  were  raised  against  them  by 
wicked  and  evil-minded  men,  to  draw  away  the 
king's  favor  from  them,"  the  Massachusetts  colo- 
nists were  "  a  people  truly  fearing  the  Lord,"  and 
very  obedient  to  Charles  II.  Randolph  did  not 
believe  this.  He  reported  them  as  actually  in  re- 
volt, and  suggested  a  forcible  way  of  bringing  them 
to  submission  :  — 

"Three  frigates  of  40  guns,  with  three  ketches  well 
manned,  lying  a  league  or  two  below  Boston,  with  His 
Majesty's  express  orders  to  seize  all  shipping,  and  per- 
form other  acts  of  hostility  against  these  revolters,  would 
bring  them  all  to  His  Majesty's  own  terms,  and  do  more 
in  one  week's  time  than  all  the  orders  of  king  and  coun- 
cil to  them  in  seven  years." 

This  advice  was  not  adopted,  but  the  king  was 
evidently  listening  to  Randolph's  suggestions,  and 
sharing  his  belief  that  Massachusetts  was  disloyal. 
Yet  Randolph  excepted   the  ministers   from  this 


88  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

charge,  saying  in    his    report,   made  October  12, 
1G76,  to  the  Board  of  Ti-ade  and  Plantations :  — 

"  The  clergy  are  for  the  most  part  very  civil,  but 
held  in  subjection  by  the  ruling  elders,  who  govern  all 
affairs  of  the  church.  The  ecclesiastical  government  is 
in  the  hands  of  lay  members,  but  no  church  censure  shall 
degrade  or  depose  any  man  from  any  civil  dignity,  office 
or  authority." 

The  first  point  taken  up  by  the  king  and  council, 
after  Randolph  reached  England,  was  the  dispute 
over  territory.  As  this  went  on  in  1677,  while  Ran- 
dolph was  attacking  the  charter  and  saying  that 
the  Massachusetts  colonists  had  "  no  right  either 
in  land  or  government  in  any  jDart  of  New  Eng- 
land, and  have  always  been  usurpers,"  the  craftier 
Bostonians  were  negotiating  with  the  grandson  of 
Gorges  for  the  purchase  of  his  rights  in  Maine, 
and  the  deed  was  signed  early  in  1678.  This  frus- 
trated a  design  of  the  king  to  unite  Maine  and  New 
Hampshire  in  one  province  as  a  principality  for 
his  son,  the  Duke  of  Monmouth,  and  it  naturally 
angered  him  greatly.  Meantime  the  English  judges, 
Rainsford  and  North,  had  decided  that  Massachu- 
setts could  extend  legally  only  three  miles  north  of 
the  Merrimac,  and  that  the  heirs  of  Mason  had  no 
right  of  government  in  New  Hampshire.  Accord- 
ingly, Massachusetts  was  notified,  in  the  summer 
of  1679,  that  its  power  over  the  four  towns  was  to 
cease.     "  As  for  New  Hampshire,  the  government 


NEW   HAMPSHIRE   A   PROVINCE  89 

is  to  rest  in  the  king's  hands."  Carrying  out  this 
}3oliey,  a  council  was  named  for  the  Province,  John 
Cutt  was  made  its  president,  and  Randolph,  in  Oc- 
tober, 1679,  sailed  for  New  York,  cai-rying  with 
him  a  commission  for  setting  up  the  new  authority 
at  Portsmouth.  He  reached  there  December  27, 
delivered  the  commission  to  Mr.  Cutt,  and  remained 
in  the  Province  until  January  22,  1G80,  by  which 
date  the  provincial  government  was  organized,  and 
the  domination  of  Massachusetts  ended. 

The  Puritan  rule  had  lasted  in  Hampton  a  little 
more  than  forty  years  ;  in  the  other  thi*ee  towns  a 
few  years  less.  It  had  been  vigorous,  often  arbi- 
trary, but  in  the  main  acceptable  to  the  people, 
and  they  saw  its  termination  with  regret.  The 
General  Court  of  New  Hampshire  in  March,  1680, 
in  its  two  branches  of  Council  and  Assembly,  had 
this  to  say  to  King  Charles,  of  "  that  shadow  of 
your  Majesty's  authority  and  government,  under 
which  we  long  found  protection,"  meaning  the  Mas- 
sachusetts domination :  — 

"  In  the  late  war,  the  barbai'ous  natives  proved  a 
heavy  scourge  to  us,  and  had  certainly  been  the  ruin  of 
these  poor  weak  plantations,  if  our  brethren  and  neigh- 
bors had  not,  out  of  pity  and  compassion,  stretched  forth 
their  helping  hand,  and  with  their  blood  and  treasure 
defended  us." 

In  the  same  letter  they  thanked  the  king  for 
"  not  imposing  strangers  upon  us,"  but  making  up 
the  Council  of  residents  and  leading  citizens.    Such 


90  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

was  indeed  the  character  of  the  first  royal  Council. 
The  four  towns  were  each  represented  in  it,  Ports- 
mouth by  four  merchants,  all  Puritans,  Dover  by 
Richard  AValdron,  the  Puritan  enemy  of  Quakers, 
Hampton  by  Christopher  Hussey,  ancestor  of  many 
Quakers,  but  a  Puritan,  and  Exeter  by  John  Gil- 
man,  head  of  the  powerful  Oilman  family  of  after 
years,  of  large  estate  and  Puritan  opinions.  John 
Cutt,  the  president,  was  aged  and  infirm,  but  fair 
minded,  less  hasty  than  his  brother  Richard,  and 
yet  firm  in  the  Puritan  interest.  They  were  at  lib- 
erty to  choose  three  other  members,  who  were  Elias 
Stileman  of  Portsmouth,  but  formerly  of  Salem, 
Samuel  Dalton  of  Hampton,  a  nephew  of  the  former 
minister  Dalton,  and  Job  Clements  of  Dover,  —  all 
pronounced  Puritans  and  hostile  to  Mason's  claim. 
Martyn  of  Portsmouth  was  made  treasurer,  and 
Stileman  secretary,  pending  the  arrival  of  Rich- 
ard Chamberlain  from  England,  whom  the  king 
had  made  Secretary  of  his  Province.  The  president 
named  Waldron  as  his  deputy  or  vice-president, 
who  in  little  more  than  a  year  succeeded  Cutt 
upon  his  death.  The  first  act  of  the  Council,  after 
reluctantly  taking  the  oath  prescribed,  of  allegiance 
and  supremacy,  was  to  call  an  Assembly  by  elec- 
tion, and  make  vip  a  list  of  voters  therefor.  These 
numbei-ed  but  209  in  the  Province,  —  71  in  Ports- 
mouth, 61  in  Dover,  57  in  Hampton,  and  but  20  in 
Exeter.  They  chose  eleven  deputies  for  a  popular 
branch,  —  John    Pickering,    Robert    Elliott,    and 


NEW   HAMPSHIRE   A   PROVINCE  91 

Philip  Lewis  from  Portsmouth ;  young  Richard 
Waldron,  Peter  Coffin,  and  Anthony  Nutter  from 
Dover;  Anthony  Stanyan,  Edward  Gove,  and 
Thomas  Marston  from  Hampton ;  and  Ralph  Hall 
and  Bartholomew  Tippin  from  Exeter.  The  two 
branches  met  in  a  tavern  at  Great  Island,  and  in 
March  following  had  a  code  of  laws  voted,  for  the 
king's  approval,  with  this  proviso  at  the  beginning 
of  them,  as  a  kind  of  Bill  of  Rights  (March  16, 
1680)  :  — 

"  It  is  ordered  and  enacted  by  this  General  Assembly 
and  the  authority  thereof,  that  no  Act,  Imposition,  Law 
or  Ordinance  be  made  or  imposed  upon  us,  but  such  as 
shall  be  made  by  the  said  Assembly,  and  approved  by 
the  President  and  Council  from  time  to  time.  That 
Justice  and  Right  be  impartially  administered  unto  all : 
not  sold,  denied  or  causelessly  deferred  unto  any." 

In  support  of  this  claim  of  full  parliamentary 
powers,  the  Assembly  cited  seven  English  statutes 
from  Henry  III,  Edward  III,  Richard  II,  and 
Charles  I  as  guaranteeing  their  rights.  This  was  a 
good  beginning,  and  the  Province  and  State  have 
maintained  these  powers  without  diminution,  most 
of  the  time  for  more  than  two  hundred  and  twenty- 
three  3''ears. 

It  was  not  the  intention  of  Charles  II,  however, 
to  allow  so  broad  a  liberty,  after  his  Governor 
should  have  arrived,  and  the  claims  of  Mason  had 
received  public  attention,  in  the  manner  directed 


92  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

by  the  royal  commission  or  charter.  His  Secretary, 
a  gentle,  inefficient  person,  fond  of  music  and  sub- 
servient to  the  Mason  party,  was  to  have  certain 
powers,  not  dependent  on  the  Assembly ;  his  Gov- 
ernor, Edward  Cranfield,  a  gentleman  of  a  decayed 
and  impoverished  family,  who  had  held  a  place 
about  the  Court,  was  to  have  important  powers, 
which  he  exercised  tyrannically.  Robert  Mason 
was  appointed  to  the  Council,  and  came  over  soon 
after  Chamberlain  arrived,  in  December,  1680 ; 
but  earlier  in  the  year  the  Assembly  had  passed  a 
law  confirming  all  titles  to  land,  which  was  in- 
tended to  negative  Mason's  claim,  though  the  king 
had  required  the  Province  to  allow  it.  Mason's 
presence  and  assertion  of  his  title  at  once  raised  a 
quarrel,  in  course  of  which  Mason  returned  to  Eng- 
land to  make  his  complaint  there.  Randolph  had 
also  returned  to  England,  after  having  battled  with 
the  Massachusetts  authorities  in  regard  to  the  col- 
lection of  revenue,  leaving  Barefoot  as  his  deputy 
to  collect  duties  and  prevent  illegal  trade  in  New 
Hampshire.  The  Navigation  Acts  restricted  trade 
greatly,  and  much  of  it  really  was  illegal ;  but  when 
Barefoot,  in  March,  1681,  published  a  notice  re- 
quiring all  vessels  at  Portsmouth  to  enter  and  clear 
luider  his  authority,  he  was  arrested  and  tried  before 
Waldron  and  the  Council  as  a  court,  and  fined  ten 
pounds.    His  offenses  were  thus  set  forth :  — 

"  For  liaviiifT  in  a  hiq;h  and  presumptuous  manner  set 
up  his  Majesty's  office  of  customs  without  leave  from  the 


NEW   HAMPSHIRE   A   PROVINCE  93 

President  and  Council,  in  contempt  of  his  Majesty's  au- 
thority in  tliis  place  ;  for  disturbing  and  obstructing  the 
subjects  in  passing  from  harbor  to  harbor  and  from  town 
to  town  ;  and  for  his  insolence  in  making  no  other  answer 
to  any  question  propounded  to  him  but  '  My  name  is 
Walter.'  " 

As  Barefoot  was  serving  directly  under  royal 
commission,  this  allegation  that  he  was  in  contempt 
of  the  king's  authority  was  of  the  same  nature  with 
the  Parliament's  declaring  they  acted  under  the 
king's  authority  in  making  war  iq^on  Cliarles  I.  The 
lessons  of  Massachusetts  independence  were  not  lost 
on  the  New  Hampshire  Puritans,  who  were  soon  in 
practical  revolt  against  their  sovereign. 

Bandolph  and  Mason,  acting  together  in  Eng- 
land, were  able  to  obtain  from  the  Coui"t  anything 
they  wanted  except  money  ;  and  late  in  1681  Mason 
came  back  to  Portsmouth  with  a  mandate  from  the 
king  requiring  the  royal  councilors  in  New  Hamp- 
shire to  admit  him  as  a  member,  which  they  obe- 
diently did.  His  agents  in  the  mean  time  were 
demanding  rents,  while  he  was  forbidding  the 
planters  to  cut  firewood  and  timber  on  his  lands, 
and  threatening  to  sell  their  houses  if  they  paid  no 
rent.  The  king,  though  he  had  promptly  disallowed 
the  laws  passed  in  1680,  among  them  the  Bill  of 
Rights,  had  taken  no  pains  to  make  his  veto  known 
in  New  Hampshire,  and  had  delayed,  with  his  cus- 
tomary negligence,  to  send  over  his  royal  Governor, 
Ccanfield,  who  did  not  land  (from  an  armed  vessel, 


94  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

at  Salem)  until  October,  1082.^  During  this  inter- 
val the  people  were  becoming  fixed  in  their  resolve 
not  to  lease  lands  of  Mason  or  to  pay  rent ;  and 
the  early  action  of  Cranfield  seemed  to  encourage 
them  in  this.  He  took  office  at  Portsmouth  Octo- 
ber 3,  1G82,  and  at  first,  upon  Chamberlain's  sug- 
gestion, removed  the  stubborn  Waldron  from  the 
Council,  at  Mason's  request.  Six  weeks  after  he 
restored  him,  as  well  as  Martyn  the  treasurer,  who 
had  also  been  dropped,  "  finding  them,"  he  wrote, 
"  very  useful  for  the  king's  service  here."  They 
were  wealtliy  and  had  popular  support,  and  he 
hoped  to  govern  more  absolutely  through  such 
men  than  through  weak  and  unpopular  persons 
like  Mason  and  Chamberlain.  He  censured  both 
these  in  his  report  to  the  Plantation  Office  (De- 
cember 1,  1682),  saying  :  — 

"  Mr.  Mason  has  much  misrepresented  the  whole  mat- 
ter, —  the  place  not  being  so  considerable,  nor  the  peo- 
])le  so  humored  as  he  reports.  There  are  but  four 
small  towns,  all  impoverished  by  the  expenses  of  the  last 

^  Edward  Cranfield  was  a  descendant  by  the  female  line  of  the 
once  powerful  Catholic  family  of  the  Parkers,  holding'  the  two 
baronies  of  Morley  and  Monteagle,  which  became  dormant  a  few 
years  later.  He  was  probably  the  g-reat-grandson  of  Edward  Cran- 
field, who  married  Elizabeth,  daughter  of  that  William  Parker, 
Lord  Monteagle,  who  disclosed  the  Gunpowder  Plot  to  the  king 
in  1605.  This  Edward  Cranfield  may  have  been  a  brother  of 
Lionel,  Earl  of  Middlesex.  Dr.  Belknap  met  with  a  Jamaica  gen- 
tleman (probably  named  Pigott),  a  great-grandson  of  the  New 
Hampshire  Governor,  who  told  him  his  ancestor  is  buried  in  the 
Cathedral  at  Bath. 


NEW   HAMPSHIRE   A   PROVINCE  95 

Indian  war,  and  sevei'al  hundred  pounds  in  debt  on  that 
account.  I  find  them  very  loyal  to  the  king,  and  respect- 
ful to  myself,  — willing  to  do  what  they  can  in  support 
of  the  government,  but  unable  to  do  so  much  as  has 
been  pretended.  Far  from  being  ready  to  own  Mason 
as  their  proprietor,  they  are  very  slow  to  admit  of  any 
one  but  the  king.  .  .  .  The  general  wish  is  for  a  decision 
of  the  case  by  law.  Mason  thought  that,  by  laying  aside 
Waldern,  Martyn  and  the  principal  minister,  Moodey,  he 
would  have  frightened  the  people  into  compliance  with 
him ;  but  finds  himself  mistaken.  .  .  .  Had  I  yielded  to 
the  violent  courses  that  Mason  and  Chamberlain  urged, 
I  should  have  greatly  disturbed  the  people,  without  pro- 
moting the  king's  interest.  .  .  .  The  attempt  to  settle 
the  way  of  the  Church  of  England  here  will  be  very 
grievous  to  the  people,  whatever  Mr.  Mason  may  have 
said.  They  are  very  diligent  and  devout  in  their  own 
worship,  very  tenacious  of  it,  and  very  grateful  for  the 
king's  indulgence  to  them  therein." 

This  was  a  candid  and  mainly  true  report.  The 
New  Hampshire  people  have  never  been  easily 
frightened  into  anything ;  and  they  were  instinc- 
tively loyal  to  any  legal  government  which  regarded 
their  public  and  private  interests.  But  Cranfield 
had  his  own  interest  to  look  after.  He  had  sold  his 
office  near  the  king,  according  to  the  ill  fashion 
of  the  day,  and  was  living  off  the  proceeds.  He 
must  therefore  soon  begin  to  draw  profit  from  his 
new  office,  and  the  people  did  not  incline  to  bribe 
him  for  their  side.    He  therefore  accepted  a  yearly 


96  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

fee  of  £130  from  Mason,  secured  by  a  mortgage 
of  the  province  rents,  bought  a  house  and  garden 
for  £450  (as  he  said),  and  prepared  to  support 
Mason  in  all  his  unwise  exactions.  Then,  four 
weeks  after  the  report  above  cited  (December  30, 
1682),  he  wrote  to  Halifax  and  the  other  Lords  of 
Trade :  — 

"  All  of  the  late  Council  and  chief  inhabitants  are  part 
of  the  grand  combination  of  cliurcli  members  and  con- 
gregational assemblies  throughout  New  England ;  and 
by  that  they  are  so  much  obliged  that  the  prejudice  of 
any  one,  if  considerable,  influences  the  whole  party.  .  .  . 
His  Majesty's  ship,  Lark,  cowed  them  for  a  time  ;  but 
as  long  as  the  ])reachers  exert  themselves  against  royal 
authority,  I  know  not  where  to  turn  for  honest  men  to 
administer  justice.  They  have  been  in  a  confederacy 
to  carry  their  cause  against  the  king  ;  but  I  doubt  not, 
in  time,  to  reduce  them  to  reason." 

Cranfield  was  speaking  more  particularly  of  the 
illicit  trade,  which  Randolph  was  then  striving  to 
regulate  by  seizing  vessels  that  carried  contraband, 
and  Barefoot  was  aiding  him  in  this  effort.  Accord- 
ingly they  seized  a  ketch  consigned  to  George  Jaf- 
frey,  a  Portsmouth  merchant,  and  gave  orders  to 
Stileman,  who  commanded  at  the  Island  fort,  not 
to  allow  her  to  pass  out  of  the  river.  Nevertheless, 
December  19,  in  broad  daylight,  the  ketch  slipped 
past  the  fort  without  a  shot,  and  in  the  court  con- 
vened to  try  the  malefactor,  Jaffrey,  ten  days  later, 
the  jury,  says  Randolph,  — 


NEW   HAMPSHIRE   A   PROVINCE  97 

"  Encouraged  by  the  arbitrary  and  successful  verdict 
of  the  Lord  Shaftsbury's  jury  at  the  Old  Bailey,  (now 
become  a  leading  precedent  to  the  factious  here)  find  di- 
rectly against  the  act  made  in  the  12th  of  the  King,  and 
bring  in  a  verdict  with  costs  against  His  Majesty  ;  which 
the  Governor  highly  resented,  —  it  being  a  contrivance 
and  combination  of  their  minister,  a  rigid  Independent, 
and  some  church  members.  Of  which  society  is  Stileman, 
Jaffrey,  the  pretended  owner  of  the  ketch  (a  Scotchman) 
and  four  of  the  leading  men  of  that  Jury.  However,  the 
Governor  hath  in  the  first  place  suspended  Stileman  the 
Council,  put  him  out  of  the  fort,  and  declared  him  unca- 
pable  of  any  place  of  trust  in  the  Province  ;  committing 
that  charge  to  the  care  of  Capt.  Barefoot,  one  of  the 
Council,  (a  sufferer  here  for  his  loyalty),  —  and  hath 
likewise  directed  me  to  prosecute  the  jury  by  attaint  or 
otherwise,  and  all  other  persons  who  shall  be  found  con- 
trivers in  this  escape.  Resolving,  as  far  as  in  him  lies,  to 
terrify  at  least,  if  not  wliolly  to  destroy  this  combination, 
carried  on  against  His  Majesty's  authority  and  the  Acts 
of  Trade  and  Navigation,  by  a  party  from  whom  the 
Minister,  one  Moodey,  a  private  trader,  receives  no  small 
profit." 

Here,  then,  early  in  Cranfield's  reign,  he  is  found 
assuming  the  arbitrary  powers  that  his    monarch 

1  The  Navig-ation  laws  were  continued  from  Cromwell's  time 
into  the  Restoration,  and  if  enforced,  greatly  damag'ed  the  colo- 
nial trade.  They  were  habitually  evaded,  therefore,  as  were  the 
revenue  laws  in  Great  Britain  by  the  smugglers,  and  any  eflFort  to 
enforce  them  was  sure  to  unite  the  merchants  in  opposition.  Joshua 
Moodey  may  have  had  ventures  in  the  vessels  of  the  Puritan  mer- 
chants of  his  flock. 


98  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

had  been  grasping  in  England,  and  the  jurymen  in 
his  province  were  taking  pattern  by  the  bold  Eng- 
lish  juries  who  resisted  Jeffries  and  the  unscrupu- 
lous English  judges.  Having  thus  united  in  his 
person  two  weak  causes,  —  the  Mason  claim,  which 
affronted  the  planters,  and  the  revenue  laws,  which 
exasperated  the  merchants,  —  it  was  no  wonder  that 
the  disaffection  in  a  naturally  loyal  people  became 
general.  His  next  step  was  to  dissolve  the  popular 
Assembly,  because  they  would  not  pass  his  revenue 
bills,  and.  thus  to  make  himself  and  the  Council 
(his  own  appointees,  if  he  so  chose)  supreme  both 
for  legislation  and  judicial  business.  They  could 
hold  courts  themselves,  or  they  could  name  the 
judges,  and  through  the  marshal  could  pack  juries. 
He  further  proceeded  to  lay  taxes,  "  since  the  king 
has  entrusted  the  disposal  and  issue  of  money  to 
my  power,  with  the  Council's  assent."  All  this  edi- 
fice of  despotism,  administered  by  one  whose  moral 
character  was  below  the  Puritan  standard,  pro- 
voked the  people  to  active  revolt,  and  a  demonstra- 
tion was  made,  even  when  Cranfield  was  writing 
to  Halifax  and  his  colleagues  the  words  last  quoted. 
Edward  Gove,  living  in  the  present  limits  of 
Seabrook,  and  representing  Hampton  in  the  dis- 
solved Assembly,  after  consulting  more  or  less  with 
the  Puritan  leaders,  but  against  their  advice,  on 
the  27th  of  January,  1683,  armed  himself,  his  son, 
and  his  servant,  and  started  on  horseback  for  Exe- 
ter, seven  miles  northward.    Passing  the  house  of 


NEW   HAMPSHIRE   A  PROVINCE  99 

Nathaniel  Weare,  a  justice  of  the  peace,  Weare 
attempted  to  arrest  liim  ;  but  he  pressed  on,  and  en- 
listed in  Exeter  and  Stratham  eight  more  men,  — 
three  sons  of  Robert  Wadleigh,  a  leading  man, 
Thomas  Rawlings,  Mark  Baker,  Edward  Smith, 
John  Sleeper,  and  John  Young,  with  a  trumpeter, 
who  escaped  arrest,  and  whose  name  has  not  been 
preserved.  All  were  armed  and  mounted,  and  took 
their  road  to  Hampton,  where  the  foot-soldiers  of 
the  town  halted  and  arrested  them,  —  the  trumpeter 
distancing  his  pursuers  by  the  speed  of  his  horse. 
No  resistance  was  made  by  Gove,  and  no  blood  was 
shed.  He  aimed  at  a  demonstration  for  which  the 
people  were  not  ready,  and  his  own  eccentric  char- 
acter seems  to  have  kept  them  back.  He  was  held 
under  a  justice's  warrant  (probably  Weare's),  in- 
dicted by  a  grand  jury  at  a  special  court  called 
February  1,  and  tried  for  his  life  the  next  day,  on 
a  charge  of  high  ti-eason.  Major  Waldron  sat  as 
pi-esiding  judge,  the  jury  were  honest  men  of  the 
vicinage,  and  the  fact  admitted  no  denial.  It  could 
not  be  treason  except  by  a  forced  construction  of 
the  English  law ;  but  as  Gove's  declared  purpose 
was  to  change  a  government  existing  by  the  king's 
special  command,  the  offense  could  be  described  as 
levying  war  against  Charles  II.  The  good-natured 
king  did  not  so  regard  it,  and  the  barbarous  sen- 
tence that  had  been  executed  on  the  regicides  by  his 
order  was  not  carried  out  in  Gove's  case.  Waldron, 
his  hard  nature  melted  to  tears  by  the  false  position 


100  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

in  wliicli  he  was  placed,  since  lie  shared  all  Gove's 
disloyalty,  gave  the  sentence  thus  :  — 

"  You  shall  be  carried  back  to  the  place  whence  you 
came  [which  was  the  fort  on  Great  Island,  used  as  a 
prison],  and  fi'om  thence  be  drawn  to  the  place  of  exe- 
cution, and  there  be  hanged  by  tlie  neck,  and  cut  down 
alive  ;  your  entrails  shall  be  taken  out  and  burned  before 
your  face,  your  head  be  cut  o£f,  and  your  body  divided 
into  four  quarters  ;  and  your  head  and  quarters  disposed 
of  at  the  king's  pleasure."  ^ 

Cranfield,  who  was  strangely  alarmed  at  Gove's 
demonstration,  hurried  him  away  to  Boston  for 
transportation  to  England,  writing  to  Sir  Leoline 
Jenkins,  secretary  of  state  (February  20,  1683)  : 
"  I  cannot  with  safety  to  myself  and  the  Province 
keep  Gove  longer  in  custody,  for  I  have  reason  to 
fear  that  he  may  escape.  I  intended  to  execute  him 
here,  for  terror  to  the  whole  party,  who  are  still 
mutinous,  had  my  commission  allowed  it.  I  am  or- 
dered to  send  home  rebels,  — and  if  Gove  escape  the 

^  This  is  the  only  sentence  of  the  kind  ever  passed  in  New 
Hampshire,  and  I  think  the  only  trial  for  treason  ever  held  there. 
It  is  probable  that  Cranfield  insisted  on  this  specific  offense  be- 
cause conviction  carried  forfeiture  of  the  culprit's  estate.  Gove's 
property  was  sold,  and  the  proceeds,  in  part,  pocketed  by  Cranfield, 
mIio  was  greedy  for  money  in  his  new  office.  After  Gove's  pardon 
by  James  II,  the  king  ordered  his  estate  "to  be  ascertained  and 
restored  to  him,"  which  was  done,  but  at  whose  expense  the  re- 
cords do  not  yet  show.  Many  of  the  papers  in  this  ease  have  dis' 
appeared  ;  others  exist  in  England,  at  the  Plantation  Office  of  thf 
Lords  of  Trade,  ^^ome  that  were  in  Dr.  Belknap's  hands  have  not- 
come  to  later  historians. 


NEW   HAMPSHIRE   A  PROVINCE  101 

sentence  of  the  law,  there  is  an  end  of  the  king's 
government  in  New  Hampshire."  In  regard  to  the 
other  prisoners,  and  the  occasion  for  haste,  Crau- 
field  added :  — 

"  Nine  others  were  taken  besides  Gove  [really  ten], 
and  on  trial  were  convicted,  but  security  lias  been  taken 
for  their  appearance,  and  they  have  been  respited,  pend- 
ing significance  of  the  king's  pleasui-e.  I  hear  that  it  is 
designed  to  petition  for  Gove's  life,  and  that  it  is  to  be 
managed  by  messengers  from  Boston  ;  if  so,  this  will 
the  more  convince  ine  that  lie  received  .encouragement 
fi'om  that  quarter.  Major  Pike,  one  of  the  magistrates, 
and  a  member  of  the  faction,  came  to  me  the  niglit  be- 
fore Gove's  trial  with  several  depositions  to  certify  that 
Gove  was  of  unsound  mind  ;  in  order  to  avoid  his  prose- 
cution I  am  forced  to  keep  the  militia  in  arms  till  Gove 
is  shipped  off." 

Randolph,  who,  with  all  his  prejudice,  was  a 
fairer-minded  man  than  Ci'anfield,  and  who  carried 
Gove  to  the  Tower  in  London,  where  he  delivered 
him  June  6,  1683,  has  left  a  long  account  of  Gove's 
rebellion,  which  may  be  quoted,  with  all  allowance 
for  its  partisan  tone  :  — 

"  Edward  Gove,  who  served  for  the  town  of  Hampton, 
a  leading  man,  and  a  great  stickler  in  the  late  proceed- 
i'lgs  of  the  Assembly,  made  it  his  business  to  stir  the 
people  U}}  to  rebellion,  by  giving  out  that  the  Governor, 
as  Vice-admiral,  acted  by  the  Duke  of  York's  commis- 
sion, who  was  a  papist,  and  would  bring  Popery  in 
among  them  ;  that  the  Governor  was  a  pretended  gov- 


102  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

ernor,  and  his  commission  was  signed  in  Scotland,  etc. 
He  endeavored  with  a  great  deal  of  pains  to  make  a 
party,  and  solicited  many  of  the  considerable  persons  in 
each  town  to  join  with  him,  to  recover  their  liberties  in- 
fringed ;  further  adding  that  his  sword  was  drawn,  and 
he  would  not  lay  it  down  till  he  knew  who  should  hold 
the  government.  .  .  .  Fearing  he  might  get  a  party  too 
strong  for  the  civil  power  (as  indeed  it  proved,  for  Jus- 
tice Wyre  and  a  marshal  and  constable  was  repulsed), 
the  Governor,  though  much  dissuaded,  forthwith  ordered 
the  militia  of  the  whole  Pi'ovince  to  be  in  arms.  .  .  . 
Gove  was  gone  to  his  party  at  Exeter,  from  whence  he 
suddenly  returned  with  twelve  men  belonging  to  that 
town,  mounted,  and  armed  with  swords,  pistols  and  guns, 
(a  trumpet  sounding)  and  Gove  with  his  sword  drawn 
riding  at  the  head  of  them  in  Hampton.  The  Governor 
was  taking  horse,  and  with  a  part  of  the  Troop  was  in- 
tending to  take  Gove  and  his  company  :  but  a  messenger 
brought  word  that  they  were  met  withal,  and  taken  by 
the  militia  of  that  town,  and  secured  with  a  guard.  The 
trumpeter,  forcing  his  way,  escaped,  after  whom  a  hue 
and  cry  was  sent  to  all  parts,  but  as  yet  he  is  not  taken. 
"  This  rising  was  unexpectedly  to  the  Party  made 
upon  the  27th  of  January.  It  is  generally  believed  many 
considerable  persons,  at  whose  houses  Gove  then  either 
sent  or  called,  to  come  ovit  and  stand  up  for  their  liber- 
ties, would  have  joined  with  him,  had  he  not  appeared 
in  arms  at  that  time.  For  upon  January  30th,  being 
appointed  by  the  Governor  a  day  of  public  humiliation, 
they  designed  to  cut  off  the  Governor,  Mr.  Mason  and 
some  others  whom  they  affected  not.  The  Governor  sent 
a  strong  party  (horse)  to  guard  the  prisoner,  then  in 


NEW   HAMPSHIRE   A   PROVINCE  103 

irons,  from  Hampton  to  Portsmouth.  They  were  ex- 
amined before  the  Governor  and  Council,  where  Gove 
behaved  himself  veiy  insolently.  They  were  all  com- 
mitted to  custody,  and  Capt.  Barefoot,  having  the  trained 
band  of  Great  Island  then  in  arms,  was  ordered  to 
take  care  of  the  prisoners,  and  keep  a  strict  watch  upon 
them,  in  regard  the  prison  was  out  of  repair.  February  2, 
they  were  all  arraigned  and  indicted  upon  the  13th  of 
the  King,  for  levying  war  against  His  Majesty.  Gove 
pleaded  to  the  indictment  '  Not  Guilty  ; '  then  Mr.  Mar- 
tin and  Capt.  Hull,  both  of  Portsmouth,  with  two  jus- 
tices of  the  peace  and  a  lieutenant  of  the  foot-company 
at  Hampton,  who  was  at  the  taking  of  them,  were  all 
sworn  in  court.  Then  Gove  owned  the  matter  of  fact, 
and  to  justify  his  taking  up  arms,  pleaded  against  the 
Governor's  power,  tliat  he  was  only  a  pretended  gov- 
ernor, by  reason  that  his  commission,  as  he  said,  was 
sealed  in  Scotland.  Likewise  that  the  Governor  had  by 
his  proclamation  appointed  January  30  to  be  annually  kept 
a  day  of  humiliation,  and  obliged  the  ministers  to  preach 
that  day ;  that  he  had  at  his  house  discoursed  to  Gove, 
and  showed  him,  out  of  the  10th  chapter  of  St.  Mark, 
the  necessity  of  children's  baptism  ;  this  he  urged  to  be 
a  great  imposing  upon  the  Ministr}-. 

"  The  other  prisoners  pleaded  not  guilty,  but  had  little 
to  say  in  defence  for  themselves,  further  than  they  were 
drawn  in  by  Gove.  The  jury,  after  long  consideration, 
found  Gove  guilty  of  high  treason  upon  the  indictment ; 
and  all  the  rest  in  arras  ;  upon  which  the  court  proceeded 
to  give  judgment,  and  passed  the  sentence  of  condem- 
nation upon  Gove.  But  in  regard  the  other  prisoners 
were  specially  found,  the  Governor  ordered  the  court  to 


104  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

respite  their  judgment  till  His  Majesty's  pleasure  should 
be  known  therein  ;  most  of  them  being  young  men,  and 
altogether  unacquainted  \¥itli  the  laws  of  England." 

Cranfield  had  named  the  fast  day  on  the  anniver- 
sary of  Charles  First's  execution,  as  a  test  of  New 
Hampshire  loyalty,  and  a  reminder  of  the  Puritan 
guilt.  He  had  no  occasion  to  fear  for  his  life  ;  yet 
it  is  quite  possible,  had  the  demonstration  been 
delayed  till  the  30th,  that  the  Governor  and  his 
oligarchy  would  have  been  driven  from  power,  as 
Andros  and  his  Council  were  in  Boston,  six  years 
later.  Gove  himself,  writing  from  the  Tower  June 
11,  1683,  said  to  Randolph  :  "  Had  I  known  the 
laws  of  the  land  to  be  contrary  to  what  was  done, 
I  would  never  have  done  it.  You  may  well  think  I 
was  ignorant  of  any  law  to  tlie  contrary,  since  for 
fourteen  or  fifteen  years  past  the  same  thing  hath 
been  done  every  year,  and  no  notice  at  all  taken 
of  it."  What  he  meant  by  this  is  hard  to  say, 
unless  lie  intended  his  movement  only  for  an  armed 
demonstration  of  public  sentiment ;  yet  we  have  no 
record  of  anything  similar,  though  the  movements 
in  Maine  against  the  Puritan  usurpation  might  be 
so  termed.  But  it  is  plain  that  the  king  and  his 
council  had  no  thought  of  hanging  "  the  Convict  of 
New  England,"  as  he  was  styled  in  the  Colonial 
Office.  He  remained  in  the  Tower,  at  the  king's 
expense,  but  unmolested,  for  two  years  and  a  quar- 
ter, and  was  then  pardoned  and  sent  liome. 

Before  he  reached  Hampton  in  the  autumn  of 


Ni:W    HAMPSHIRE   A   PROVINCE  105 

1685,  Cranfield's  despotism  had  fallen,  and  Bare- 
foot was  acting  Govei-nor  of  the  Province.  The 
course  of  the  royal  governor  was  short,  and  steadily 
downward,  though  he  was  so  misguided  as  to  sup- 
pose he  might  be  nominated  governor-general  of 
all  New  England,  when  the  charters  should  be 
withdrawn,  as  Randolph  was  steadily  and  success- 
fully urging.  Cranfield's  New  Hampshire  office 
happened  to  coincide  in  time  with  that  of  a  far 
wiser  man,  George  Savile,  Marquis  of  Halifax, 
who  was  in  the  English  Privy  Council  during  part 
of  three  reigns,  and  in  1684-85  was  president  of 
the  Council.  He  had  joined  the  cabinet  of  Shafts- 
bury  in  1679,  and  by  his  combination  of  wit  and 
reasoning  in  1683  had  prevailed  on  the  peers  to 
defeat  the  bill  excluding  James  II  from  the  throne 
as  a  Catholic.  This  entitled  him  to  the  gratitude 
of  Charles  and  James,  yet  he  sincerely  withstood 
their  tyrannies,  as  well  as  the  gold  of  the  French 
king,  which  found  its  way  into  so  many  princely 
pockets.  Macaulay,  whose  hero  he  is,  says  :  "  When 
he  had  been  found  incorruptible,  all  the  art  and 
influence  of  the  French  embassy  were  employed  to 
drive  him  from  office;  but  his  polished  wit  and  his 
varied  accomplishments  had  made  him  so  agreeable 
to  Charles  II  that  the  design  failed."  ^    He  was  still 

1  Macaulay^s  History  of  England,  vol.  i.  chap,  ii.,  near  the  end. 
The  historian  assumes  that  Halifax,  and  not  his  iinele,  Sir  William 
Coventry,  was  the  author  of  the  famous  CJiaracter  of  a  Trimmer, 
and  that  is  now  the  best  opinion.  The  quotation  following  is  from 
the  papers  of  Barillou,  the  French  envoy. 


106  NEW    HAMPSHIRE 

in  the  Council  when  Charles  died,  and  he  was  con- 
tinued there  by  James  long  enough  to  discharge 
Cranfield,  and  set  Gove  free  from  the  Tower,  that 
had  i^roved  so  fatal  the  year  before  to  Sidney  and 
Russell,  Gove's  most  illustrious  fellow-convicts. 

No  doubt  the  good  sense  of  Halifax  had  some- 
thing to  do  with  the  speedy  resolve  of  the  king's 
Council  not  to  hang  Gove  ;  he  was  by  their  vote 
merely  "  continued  in  the  Tower."  This  news 
reached  Cranfield  early  in  November,  1683,  and 
he  wrote  at  once  to  the  lords  to  say :  "  The  news 
of  Gove's  pardon  has  had  a  very  ill  effect  on  the 
people,  as  appears  by  the  prosecution  of  Mr.  Ma- 
son's concerns."  After  obtaining  verdicts  in  his 
favor  from  a  packed  jury,  in  thirty  or  forty  suits, 
Mason  saw  that  he  could  not  collect  his  rents  with- 
out force,  and  when  that  was  tried,  the  people, 
angered  by  Gove's  cruel  sentence  and  Mason's  exac- 
tions, rose  and  repelled  force  with  force,  —  "  being 
stirred  up,"  said  Cranfield,  "  by  Major  Waldern, 
Mr.  Moodey  and  Captain  Vaughan.  I  have  put  the 
last-named  out  of  the  Council  for  indecent  carriage 
and  dangerous  words,  and  put  Mr.  Randolph  in  his 
place."  Cranfield  also  brought  suits  in  his  own 
name,  and  by  the  use  of  his  civil  and  military  offi- 
cers sent  to  prison  Waldron,  Vaughan,  Moodey, 
Stileman,  and  many  of  the  other  leading  men. 
Some  escaped  at  once,  by  the  connivance  of  the 
jailer  or  the  aid  of  the  people ;  others  were  fined 
and  bailed  out.    While  this  was  beginning,  Nathan- 


NEW   HAMPSHIRE   A   PROVINCE  107 

iel  Weare,  the  chief  man  of  Hampton  (ancestor  of 
the  move  eminent  President  Weare  of  the  Revolu- 
tion), slipped  out  of  the  Province  (with  a  sum  of 
money  raised  by  the  planters  and  merchants  for 
the  cost  of  his  mission),  and  took  his  way  to  Lon- 
don, with  a  numerously  signed  petition  to  the  king, 
complaining  of  d'anfield's  arbitrary  acts  and  his 
disturbing  government.  Randolph  was  also  in  Lon- 
don, saw  the  petition  and  complaint,  and  wrote  pri- 
vately to  a  Boston  friend  (July  26,  1684)  :  '^  Wyre 
hath  lately  put  in  articles  against  Mr.  Cranfield, 
which  render  him  here  a  very  ill  man,  and  in  time 
will  do  his  business."  And  it  was  not  long  after 
that  Halifax,  who  had  seen  and  heard  both  Weare 
and  Randolph,  was  known  to  argue  against  the 
infamous  Jeffries  for  the  liberty  of  the  people  in 
New  England.  Barillon  reported  in  a  letter  to 
Louis  XIV  (December  1,  1684)  :  — 

"  My  Lord  Halifax  took  upon  him  to  contend,  with 
great  warmth,  that  the  same  laws  in  force  in  England 
ought  to  be  established  in  a  country  inhabited  by  Eng- 
lishmen ;  that  an  absolute  government  was  neither  so 
happy  nor  so  safe  as  one  that  is  tempered  by  laws ;  and 
that  he  could  not  make  his  mind  easy  to  live  in  a  coun- 
try where  the  king  should  have  power  to  take  the  money 
he  had  in  his  pocket,  whenever  His  Majesty  saw  fit." 

To  this  the  Grand  Monarque  replied  (he  was 
first  cousin  to  Charles  and  James,  the  sons  of  a 
French    princess) :    "I    do    not   wonder    that    the 


108  NEW    HAMPSHIRE 

Dake  of  York  has  called  liis  brother's  attention  to 
the  consequences  of  such  a  view.  Lord  Halifax's 
reasoning-  on  the  best  way  to  jrovern  New  England 
scarcely  merits  the  confidence  which  my  cousin  the 
king  has  in  him."  But  those  views  prevailed  in  re- 
gard to  New  Hampshire,  although  Massachusetts 
and  the  other  colonies  had  to  wait  a  few  years 
longer  for  their  application.  Charles  H  died  in 
February,  1685,  and  in  the  following  April  Cran- 
field,  already  warned  that  his  conduct  was  under 
inquiry,  received  (perhaps  by  the  hand  of  Weare, 
who  was  then  returning  to  Hampton)  a  rebuke 
from  Halifax,  pi-esident  of  the  Priv}-  Council,  say- 
ing (April  28,  1G85)  :  — 

"  You  have  not  pursued  your  instructions  in  reference 
to  the  propriety  of  the  soil  which  Robert  Mason  Esq. 
claims  in  the  Province  of  New  Hauijjshire.  You  were 
instructed,  in  case  the  inhabitants  should  refuse  to  agree 
with  the  said  Mason,  that  you  should  interpose  and  en- 
deavor to  reconcile  all  differences  ;  wliicli  if  you  could 
not  effect,  you  were  then  to  send  to  His  Majesty  such 
cases,  fairly  and  impartially  stated,  together  with  your 
opinion,  for  His  Majesty's  determination.  Instead  whereof 
you  have  caused  courts  to  be  held  in  New  Hanijishire, 
and  permitted  titles  to  lands  to  be  decided  there,  and 
uni'easonable  costs  to  be  allowed." 

It  might  have  been  rejoined  by  Cranfield,  had 
he  the  spirit  or  opportunity  to  repl}^  that  this 
"  trial  upon  the  place "  for  the  protection  of  the 
"  terre-tenants "    was    precisely    what    the    king's 


NEW  HAMPSHIRE   A   PROVINCE  109 

judges  had  suggested  in  1677.  But  in  fact  Cran- 
field  bad  seen  that  the  ease  was  going  against  him, 
and  had  requested  leave  of  absence  on  account  of 
bis  health,  which  was  granted  late  in  168-4,  but 
did  not  take  effect  till  June,  1685,  and  he  sailed 
from  Boston  to  Barbados  eTune  9.  Randolph  had 
turned  against  him  before  that,  and  wrote  to  one  of 
his  patrons,  Lloyd,  Bishop  of  St.  Asaph  (March, 
1685)  :  — 

"  Whoever  goes  over  Governor  with  expectation  to 
make  his  foi-tune,  will  disserve  the  king,  disappoint  him- 
self, and  utterly  ruin  that  country.  .  .  .  They  are  a  great 
body  of  people,  sober  and  industrious,  and  in  time  of 
war  able  to  drive  the  French  out  of  all  their  Ameri- 
can dominions.  .  .  .  Cranfield  in  New  Hampshire  by  his 
arbitrary  proceedings  has  so  harassed  that  poor  people 
that,  although  they  had  cause  to  complain  of  the  hard 
usage  of  the  Boston  Governors,  under  wliom  they  lately 
were,  yet  they  have  greater  reason  now  to  pray  an  alter- 
ation, and  wish  again  to  be  under  the  Bostoners.  For 
Mr.  Cranfield  has  quite  ruined  that  place  ;  and  his  open 
immorality  in  Boston  .  .  .  has  rendered  His  Majesty's 
government  very  contemptible.  And  should  a  Governor 
go  over  who  will  tread  in  Mr.  Cran field's  steps,  or  do 
worse  things  (if  possible),  it  will  cool  the  inclinations  of 
good  men,  and  make  them  take  the  first  occasion  to  free 
themselves.  Besides,  't  will  above  all  greatly  reflect  upon 
our  Church,  to  have  men  of  ill  principle  and  debauched 
lives  appear  as  the  promoters  of  that  religion  they  so 
much  dishonor." 

This  was  said  partly  to  prevent  the  appointment 


110  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

of  Kirke,  the  infamous  leader  of  the  king's  soldiers 
in  the  campaign  against  Monmouth,  who  was  seri- 
ously canvassed  for  the  place  soon  given  to  Andros, 
a  far  less  objectionable  man.  Oddly,  it  was  Jef- 
fries who  censured  Kirke  for  his  bi'utality,  according 
to  Randolph,  who  wrote  to  Southwell,  August  29, 
1685  :  "  I  heard  ray  Lord  Jeffries  give  him  a  severe 
welcome  to  Windsor,  last  Sunday,  and  told  him 
(Kirke)  he  had  not  only  a  bare  report,  but  in- 
formations upon  oaths  of  sufficient  and  loyal  wit- 
nesses ;  and  that  he  had  done  more  than  he  could 
answer,"  etc. 

After  Cranfield's  departure  the  government  of 
Walter  Barefoot  was  more  sinned  against  than  sin- 
ning ;  for  that  humorous  functionary  was  growing 
old,  and  was  well  aware  of  the  popular  feeling 
against  Mason  and  his  friends.  There  is  little  re- 
cord of  oj^pression  or  misconduct  by  him  or  Mason, 
who  lived  in  Barefoot's  house  at  Great  Island, 
where  both  of  them  were  set  upon  and  maltreated 
by  Barefoot's  brother-in-law,  Thomas  Wiggin  of 
Dover,  as  their  agents  and  officers  had  been  in 
Cranfield's  time  by  the  indignant  people  of  the 
Province.  This  occurred  late  in  December,  1685, 
after  Mason  had  posted  certain  declarations  to  the 
people  whom  he  regarded  as  his  delinquent  tenants, 
inviting  them  to  pay  what  they  owed  him.  Wiggin 
and  an  old  Dover  planter,  Anthony  Nutter,  who 
had  served  in  the  Assembly  with  Gove,  and  even 
been  for  a  time  in  the  Council,  had  called  on  Bare- 


NEW   HAMPSHIRE   A   PROVINCE  111 

foot,  the  acting  Governor,  and  been  invited  by- 
Mason  to  supper.  What  followed  was  sworn  to 
by  Mason,  before  Secretary  Chamberlain,  March  6, 
1686 : — 

"  After  supper,  Wiggin  said  lie  and  others  had  read 
the  papers  I  had  set  up,  but  they  did  not  regard  them, 
nor  value  them  at  a  rush ;  for  I  had  nothing  to  do  in 
that  Province,  nor  had  one  foot  of  land  therein,  nor  ever 
should  have  ;  and  withal  did  give  very  abusive  and  pro- 
voking language,  so  that  I  commanded  him  to  go  out  of 
the  room.  Which  he  did  not,  but  asked  the  Deputy  Gov- 
ernor whose  the  house  was,  —  Barefoot's  or  Mason's  ? 
The  Deputy  told  him  that  the  house  and  servants  were 
mine,  and  entreated  him  to  be  gone,  and  not  make  a  dis- 
turbance. I  then  opened  the  door,  and  took  Wiggin  by 
the  arm  to  put  him  forth,  saying  he  should  not  stay  there 
to  affront  me  in  my  own  house. 

"  Whereupon  Wiggin  took  hold  of  my  cravat,  and, 
being  a  big,  strong  man,  pulled  me  to  the  chimney  and 
threw  me  upon  the  fire,  and  lay  upon  me,  and  did  en- 
deavor to  strangle  me.  .  .  .  Had  it  not  been  for  the  Dep- 
uty Governor,  who  was  all  that  time  endeavoring  to 
pluck  Wiggin  off  from  me,  I  do  verily  believe  I  had  been 
murdered.  I  was  no  sooner  got  out  of  the  fire  but  the 
said  Wiggin  laid  hands  on  the  Deputy  Governor,  threw 
him  into  the  fire,  and  fell  upon  him.  so  that  two  of  his 
ribs  were  broke.  I  did  with  much  difficulty  pull  Wiggin 
ofP  the  Deputy  Governor.  .  .  .  Thereupon  I  called  to  a 
maid-servant  to  fetch  my  sword,  saying  '  the  villain 
would  murder  the  Deputy  Governor.'  The  servant  com- 
ing with  my  sword  in  the  scabbard,  I  took  hold  thereof, 


112  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

—  but  it  was  snatched  out  of  my  hands  by  Anthony 
Nutter  ;  nor  did  the  said  Nutter  give  any  help  to  the 
Deputy  Governor." 

This  was  scandalous  ;  but  it  was  a  natural  return 
for  what  Mason  had  threatened  two  years  before, 
in  the  height  of  Cranfield's  power.  In  April,  1683, 
while  Gove  was  on  his  voyage  to  England,  in  irons, 
this  same  Wiggin,  being  at  the  same  house  of  his 
brother-in-law,  heard  Mason  say,  "  lie  would  seize 
Major  Waldron's,  Moodey's,  Partridge's  and  Cap- 
tain Tippin's  lands,  who  should  not  have  one  foot 
in  the  Province,  —  and  that  he  would  live  on  An- 
drew Wiggin's  farm,  being  a  good  one.  [A  bro- 
ther of  Thomas  Wiggin  and  son-in-law  of  Governor 
Bradstreet,  at  Exeter.]  That  the  people  had  been 
in  one  rebellion,  and  he  would  force  them  into  a 
second,  and  then  hang  them.  That  New  England 
had  now  no  friends  in  the  [Privy]  Council  or  Com- 
mittee, though  formerly  they  had  the  Lord  Privy 
Seal.  That  he  and  his  two  sons  would  fight  any  six 
there,  for  the  Province,  at  sharps."  In  the  two  in- 
tervening years  the  tide  had  turned,  and  Randolph, 
writing  in  London  ten  weeks  before  the  assault  on 
Mason,  said :  "  Since  charters  are  now  at  so  low 
an  ebb,  I  fear  Mr.  Mason  will  find  little  benefit  by 
his  antique  grants  in  New  England."  Yet  when 
Randolph  came  over  again  the  next  year,  Mason  was 
appointed  a  member  of  the  general  Council  for  all 
New  England,  of  which  Joseph  Dudley  was  presi- 
dent, and  Randolph  secretary  ;    and  their  powers 


NEW   HAMPSHIRE   A   PROVINCE  113 

superseded  those  of  Barefoot  and  his  friends  in 
New  Hampshire.  Mason  was  sent  from  Boston  to 
London  early  in  June,  1686,  to  carry  the  address 
of  the  new  President  and  Council  to  James  II 
at  Windsor,  where  he  presented  it,  July  26  ;  and 
though  he  returned  to  Boston  the  following  May, 
he  never  seems  to  have  visited  New  Hampshire 
again.  Sir  Edmund  Andros,  the  governor-general, 
reached  Boston  December  19,  1686,  and  was  the 
nominal  ruler  of  New  Hampshire  until  his  arrest 
in  Boston,  in  April,  1689.  The  only  member  of  his 
Council  residing  in  New  Hampshire  was  John 
Hincks,  and  it  does  not  appear  that  Andros  him- 
self made  more  than  a  formal  visit  to  the  Province. 
Chamberlain  was  made  clerk  of  the  courts,  and 
Pheasant  Eastwick  coroner ;  while  Richard  Wal- 
dron,  Jr.,  son  of  the  old  Major,  became  Randolph's 
deputy  register  in  the  Province.  The  arrest  and 
imprisonment  of  Andros,  Dudley,  Randolph,  and 
the  rest,  in  1689,  terminated  the  old  provincial 
government,  so  that  it  will  be  convenient  to  take 
up  the  history  under  William  III  in  a  separate 
chapter.  By  request  of  hundreds  of  the  inhabit- 
ants, among  them  the  Waldrons  and  Wentworths 
of  Dover,  the  Vaughans,  Martins,  Pickerings, 
Langdons,  and  Sherburns  of  Portsmouth ;  the  San- 
borns,  Weares,  Goves,  and  Husseys  of  Hampton, 
and  the  Gilmans  and  Wiggins  of  Exeter  and 
Stratham,  the  revolutionary  provisional  government 
of  Massachusetts  took  charge  of  New  Hampshire 


114  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

(February  28,  1690),  having  previously  made  Ma- 
jor Waldron  commander-in-chief  of  the  soldiers  of 
that  Province  (April  23,  1689).  But  this  veteran 
was  murdered  by  Indians  in  his  own  house  at  Do- 
ver, June  27  following,  and  the  controversy  he  had 
so  long  led  against  the  heirs  of  Mason  passed  into 
other  hands.  A  few  years  earlier,  Robert  Mason 
had  sold  to  Dudley,  Randolph,  John  Usher,  Tyng, 
and  others,  a  million  acres  along  the  Merriniac 
northward  to  Lake  Winnipiseogee,  and  leased  to 
Hezekiah  Usher  and  his  heirs  all  the  mines,  miner- 
als, and  ores  of  New  Hampshire  for  one  thousand 
years.  These  transactions,  together  with  a  sale  of 
the  whole  Province  to  Samuel  Allen,  whose  son-in- 
law  was  John  Usher,  in  1691,  by  Robert  Mason's 
two  sons,  proved  the  fruitful  source  of  more  liti- 
gation in  the  early  eighteenth  century. 


CHAPTER  V 

EARLY    LAWS    AND    CUSTOMS 

The  situation  of  New  Hampshire  for  more  than 
eighty  years  after  its  permanent  settlement  by  Eu- 
ropeans, in  1623,  was  anomalous,  far  beyond  the 
irregularity  of  most  of  the  colonies.  This  was  a  re- 
sult of  frequent  changes  in  the  government,  by  the 
intrusion  of  Massachusetts  into  the  affairs  of  New 
Hampshire,  begun  and  continued  through  the  Eng- 
lish Revolution  of  1640-1660  ;  and,  afterwards,  by 
the  efforts  of  the  Stuart  kings  to  overthrow  the 
Massachusetts  Charter  and  place  all  New  England 
under  one  government  as  crown  colonies.  After 
these  long-pursued  and  partially  successful  efforts 
had  failed,  by  the  English  Revolution  of  1688-89, 
the  interference,  both  of  Massachusetts  and  of 
royal  favorites  in  England,  was  prolonged  until 
1741,  when  New  Hampshire  finally  became  an 
independent  Province,  with  its  own  established 
bounds,  Governors,  and  Legislatures.  It  was  thus 
prepared  for  taking  a  unique  part  as  Colony  and 
State  in  the  Revolution  of  1775,  and  in  the  estab- 
lishment of  the  nation,  in  1789,  under  the  Consti- 
tution of  Washington,  Franklin,  and  Madison,  as 


116  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

amended  with  the  additions  suggested  by  Jefferson. 
These  anomalies  in  legislation  and  the  legal  prac- 
tice were  set  forth,  with  learning  and  humor,  by 
Mr.  John  M.  Shirley,  an  eminent  lawyer  of  New 
Hampshire,  in  1883 ;  but  the  whole  story,  of  legis- 
lation, disallowance  of  laws,  and  conflicting  juris- 
dictions, has  never  been  so  well  told  as  in  an  edition 
of  the  New  Hampshire  Province  Laws  issued  in 
1903,  as  a  volume  of  the  State  Papers.  Without 
following  all  the  intricacies  of  this  story,  it  will  be 
sufficient  here  to  summarize  the  facts,  and  to  show 
how  the  good  sense  and  sturdy  independence  of 
the  plain  people  overcame  difficulties  that  would 
seem  insurmountable  to  pedants  officially  prescrib- 
ing what  might  or  might  not  legally  be  done. 

The  four  original  towns,  Dover,  Portsmouth, 
Exeter,  and  Hampton,  were,  of  necessity,  inde- 
pendent republics,  for  they  grew  up  outside  of  any 
established  jurisdiction.  Massachusetts  claimed 
most  of  Mason's  land-grant  under  its  charter  from 
the  Plymouth  Company  of  England ;  but  in  the 
period  immediately  following  1623,  this  charter 
did  not  exist,  while  from  1634  onward,  until  the 
power  of  Charles  I  and  ArchbishojD  Laud  was 
broken  by  the  Long  Parliament  in  1641,  the  royal 
favor  was  so  plainly  withdrawn  from  Massachusetts, 
and  extended  to  the  followers  of  the  Anglican 
Church  in  New  Hampshire  and  Maine,  that  Win- 
throp,  Dudley,  and  the  Boston  oligarchy  made  no 
serious  attempt  to  interfere  with  the   settlements 


EARLY   LAWS   AND   CUSTOMS  117 

north   of  the  Merrimac  and  east  of  the  Pascata- 
qua. 

Therefore,  when  John  Wheelwright  was  banished 
from  Massachusetts,  he  naturally  settled  at  Exeter, 
as  Churchmen  and  Baptists  and  men  of  no  religion 
had  settled  before  at  Dover  and  the  Strawberry 
Bank.  In  the  same  year  (1638)  which  saw  Wheel- 
wright, Leavitt  and  their  company  at  Exeter,  an 
older  friend  of  Wheelwright's,  Rev.  Stephen  Bach- 
iler,  himself  suspected  of  heresy  in  Massachusetts, 
but  not  yet  under  ban,  joined  with  Winthrop's 
son  John,  afterwards  Governor  of  Connecticut,  in 
laying  out  a  plantation  at  Hampton,  which  soon 
became  a  town  in  special  favor  with  Boston.  Each 
of  these  small  plantations  had  its  own  local  govern- 
ment, and  owed  no  allegiance  to  any  overlord  ex- 
cept the  King  of  England,  to  whom  they  professed 
themselves  loyal  subjects.  Mr.  Shirley  observed, 
and  it  is  strictly  true,  that  "  in  the  just  sense  of 
the  terra,  the  genuine  township  system  originated 
and  was  developed  in  New  Hampshire."  Each  town 
chose  a  ruler  or  judge,  with  assistants  or  associates, 
and  courts  of  first  instance,  which  were  also  of  last 
resort,  —  for  where  could  an  appeal  be  made  ?  It  is 
the  opinion  of  good  jurists,  of  whom  may  be  named 
AVebster's  senior  and  friend.  Judge  Smith  of  Exe- 
ter, that  this  town  legislation  was  "  not  only  sensi- 
ble and  wise,  but  far  in  advance  of  what  we  should 
expect ; "  and  Mr.  Shirley  thinks  the  action  of 
these  primitive  courts  "equally  sensible  and  just." 


118  NEW  hampshirp: 

Thrown  upon  themselves  in  a  new  country,  with 
wild  savages  on  one  side  and  religious  bigots  on 
the  other,  they  did  what  was  best  for  the  general 
good,  without  too  much  regard  to  the  law  of  Moses, 
or  the  laws  of  England.  They  established  a  com- 
mon or  customary  law,  enacting  what  was  most 
fitting  for  honest  men  to  do,  and  what  would  most 
surely  restrain  the  dishonest.  And  therefore,  when 
Massachusetts  poured  out  upon  them  her  mixture 
of  Mosaic  and  English  law,  from  1641  to  1680,  and 
when  the  Stuarts,  from  1680  till  their  downfall, 
sought  to  introduce  new  rules  of  land  tenure,  local 
government,  and  the  management  of  courts  and 
juries,  —  the  plain  New  Hampshire  planters,  trad- 
ers, fishermen,  and  lumbermen,  easy  to  lead  but 
veiy  hard  to  drive,  took  what  they  pleased  of  this 
legislation,  and  threw  aside  the  rest,  with  as  much 
nonchalance  as  consisted  with  good  neighborhood 
and  real  affection  for  the  English  monarchy,  under 
which  they  had  been  bred.  It  is  both  touching  and 
amusing  (since  the  persecutions  they  suffered  for 
a  time  left  no  permanent  ill  results)  to  read  the 
quiet  and  successful  resistance  to  arbitrary  power 
which  these  small  communities  in  the  wilderness 
made  from  decade  to  decade.  Their  experience 
stood  them  in  good  stead  at  the  opening  of  the 
Revolution ;  for  they  seem  to  have  been  no  more  in 
awe  of  George  III  in  1775  than  they  had  been  of 
Charles  II  in  1685,  when  they  neutralized  all  his 
efforts  to  make  them  tenants  of  the  impecunious 


EARLY   LAWS   AND   CUSTOMS  119 

Robert  Mason.  Not  that  they  had  nny  fixed  objec- 
tion to  kings  as  such.  If,  in  1620,  as  Emerson 
relates,  "  God  said,  '  I  am  tired  of  kings,' "  this 
remark  had  not  reached  New  Hampshire  ;  her  peo- 
ple accepted  the  tradition  of  kingship  as  they  did 
other  traditions,  —  but  did  not  let  it  interfere  with 
their  notion  of  what  good  government  ought  to  be. 
When  the  Massachusetts  Puritans,  in  1641,  find- 
ing that  neither  Charles  Stuart  nor  his  prelates 
were  likely  to  give  them  trouble  for  some  time  to 
come,  proposed  to  the  four  New  Hampshire  towns 
to  accept  the  Boston  jurisdiction,  they  must  re- 
nounce their  pet  notion  of  a  religious  oligarchy,  in 
order  to  tempt  the  settlers  on  the  Pascataqua  to 
renounce  their  independence  and  come  into  an 
association  which  common  sense  dictated.  They 
therefore  recognized,  as  freemen  in  the  New  Hamp- 
shire towns,  not  only  church  members,  who  had  been 
the  only  voters  in  Massachusetts  since  1633,  but 
all  other  substantial  persons  ;  and  all  the  four  towns 
were  practically  allowed  to  govern  themselves  by 
their  own  officers,  as  they  had  done  before.  Wheel- 
wright, however,  finding  the  Boston  intolerance 
following  him  into  Exeter,  withdrew  to  Maine,  and 
became  pastor  at  Wells  ;  while  his  old  friend  Bach- 
iler,  at  Hampton,  was  invited  by  George  Cleeve  to 
take  a  parish  at  Casco  (now  Portland).  Ancient 
acquaintance  with  the  Winthrop  family,  and  per- 
haps too  much  reliance  on  their  gentleness,  detained 
the  old  founder  of  Hampton  in  New  Hampshire, 


120  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

until  Increasing  infirmities,  and  some  of  the  oLH- 
quities  of  advanced  age,  made  his  children  remove 
him  to  England  in  1654. 

It  might  be  too  much  to  say,  as  Emerson  does 
of  the  old  town  records  of  Concord,  "  I  find  our 
annals  marked  with  uniform  good  sense  ;  I  find 
no  ridiculous  laws,  no  eaves-dropping  legislators, 
no  hanging  of  witches,  no  ghosts,  no  whipping  of 
Quakers,  no  unnatural  crimes."  But  in  the  main 
this  is  true  for  early  New  Hampshire.  The  first  code 
of  general  law  for  the  Province,  framed  in  1680, 
but  disallowed  in  England,  prescribed  death  for  any 
Christian  "  so  called,"  who  should  "  be  a  Witch, 
that  is,  hath  or  consulteth  with  a  familiar  Spirit ; " 
and  under  the  Massachusetts  rule  the  Mosaic  law 
did  not  suffer  a  witch  to  live.  But  no  witch  was 
ever  put  to  death  in  New  Hampshire,  and  very  few 
old  women  were  molested  or  complained  of  as 
witches.  The  first  case  was  that  of  Jane  Walford 
of  Portsmouth,  who  in  1656  was  brought  before 
Major  Waldron  in  the  Dover  and  Portsmouth 
special  court,  upon  suspicion  of  being  a  witch.  She 
was  allowed  to  go  upon  her  good  behavior ;  but  in 
1669  she  brought  an  action  for  damages  against 
her  accuser,  and  recovered  five  pounds  and  costs. 
Before  1672  Mary  Greenland,  wife  of  Dr.  Henry 
Greenland,  then  living  at  Kittery,  was  accused  by 
some  of  the  New  Hampshire  gossips  of  being  a 
witch,  but  nothing  came  of  it.  In  1680,  however,  the 
coroner's  jury  in  Hampton,  including  thirteen  of  the 


EARLY   LAWS   AND   CUSTOMS  121 

most  respectable  citizens,^  after  viewing  the  body 
of  a  dead  child,  found  '"•  grounds  of  suspicion  that 
the  said  child  was  murdered  by  witchcraft ; "  and 
the  case  was  carried  to  court.  It  was  then  testified 
that  Rachel  Fuller,  the  alleged  witch,  had  mentioned 
"  eight  women  and  two  men  that  she  reckoned  for 
witches  and  wizards  in  Hampton,  —  Eunice  Cole, 
Benjamin  Evans's  wife  and  her  daughters,  Good- 
wife  Boulter  and  her  daughter  Prescott,  and  Good- 
wife  Towle,^  and  one  that  is  now  dead,"  This 
Eunice  Cole  had  been  charged  with  witchcraft  in 
1656,  convicted,  whipped,  and  sent  up  to  Boston 
to  be  imprisoned  for  life.  But  in  a  dozen  years 
or  more  she  was  sent  back  to  Hampton  and  there 
maintained  as  a  pauper,  until  a  new  charge  of 
witchcraft  was  made  against  her  in  1672,  and  she 
was  again  sent  to  Boston  to  await  trial.  No  legal 
evidence  of  the  fact  appeared,  and  she  was  returned 
once  more  to  Hampton,  under  ''  just  ground  of 
vehement  suspicion  of  her  having  had  familiarity 
with  the  devil."  But  it  is  to  be  noted  that  Hamp- 
ton was  specially  connected  with  the  oligarchy  of 
Massachusetts,  where  the  witchcraft  delusion  grew 
to  a  disastrous  height  in  1692,  under  the  rhetoric 
of  Cotton  Mather  and  other  ministers, — the  min- 
ister of  Hampton  being  Seaborn  Cotton,  an  uncle 
of  Mather,  and  a  persecutor  of  Quakers, 

Religious  intolerance  was  mostly  foreign  to  early 

^  Several  of  these  were  of  the  author's  ancestry,  as  were  Mrs. 
Towle  and  Mrs.  Prescott. 


122  '  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

New  Hampshire^;  partly  because  there  was  a  mix- 
ture of  members  of  the  Anglicau  Church  amoug  the 
settlers,  as  well  as  of  heretics  and  irreligious  per- 
sons whom  Massachusetts  excluded.  The  Massa- 
chusetts spirit  of  persecution  showed  itself  in  1662, 
under  Major  Waldron,  who,  as  already  mentioned, 
then  issued  his  order  for  whipping  Quaker  women 
at  the  cart's  tail  through  a  dozen  towns  under  the 
Puritan  domination.  But  Waldron  and  Cotton 
were  exceptions  to  the  general  mildness  of  New 
Hampshire  toward  the  Quakers,  who  soon  became 
numerous  in  the  four  towns,  and  across  the  Pascata- 
qua  in  Kittery  and  Eliot.  The  same  year  in  which 
Waldron  sentenced  the  Quaker  women,  he  wrote 
to  a  Massachusetts  friend:  *' Major  Shapleigh  shel- 
ters all  the  Quakers  that  come  into  our  parts,  and 
f olloweth  them  where  they  meet :  which  is  not  only 
a  disturber  upon  that  side  of  the  river,  but  also 
on  our  side,  where  is  but  the  river  between.  And 
some  say  he  is  dictated  by  the  little  crooked 
Quaker  [Edward  Wharton].  And  so  they  come 
into  our  town,  and  presently  they  are  gone  over  the 
river ;  and  so  his  house  is  the  harbor  for  them." 
Shapleigh,  though  made  a  militaiy  officer  in  1656, 
had  become  a  Quaker ;  he  was  a  partisan  of  Bare- 
foot, Champernown,  and  the  other  oj^ponents  of  the 
Puritans,  and  all  the  more  tolerant  because  his 
friends  were  under  ban  as  favoring  the  Church  of 
England.  Yet  the  Cranfield  laws  of  1682,  supposed 
to  be  less  favorable  to  the  Puritans,  provided 


EARLY  LAWS  AND  CUSTOMS  123 

"  That  whosoever  shall  speak  contemptuously  of  the 
Scriptures,  or  holy  penmen  tiiereof,  shall  be  punished  by 
a  fine  not  exceeding  five  pounds.  And  whosoever  shall 
behave  himself  contemptuously  toward  the  Word  of  God 
preached,  or  any  minister  thereof,  called  and  faithfully 
dispensing  the  same  to  any  congregation,  either  by  mani- 
fest interrupting  of  him,  or  falsely  charging  him  with 
teaching  error,  shall  pay  a  fine  of  20  shillings,  or  sit  in 
the  stocks  two  hours." 

As  such  interruptions  and  charges  were  part  of 
the  mission  of  vagrant  Quakers,  this  statute  seems 
to  have  been  a  survival  of  the  Puritan  code.  Church- 
going  was  enjoined  in  New  Hampshire  by  law,  or 
at  any  rate  by  custom,  and  it  was  ordered  in  the 
Cranfield  code  that  "  the  Lord's  day  "  should  not 
be  profaned  by  servile  labor,  travel,  sport,  frequent- 
ing Ordinaries  in  time  of  public  worship,  or  "  idly 
strasfS'lino:  abroad,"  —  the  fine  for  such  conduct 
being  ten  shillings  or  an  hour  in  the  stocks.  And 
because  "sundry  dissolute  persons,"  if  fined,  might 
not  have  money  to  pay,  without  injury  to  their 
families,  it  was  provided  that  poor  persons  should 
be  whipped  instead  of  fined,  —  the  ratio  being,  for 
a  ten-shilling  fine,  five  stripes ;  for  twenty  shillings, 
ten  stripes ;  for  fines  between  one  and  five  pounds, 
twenty  stripes,  and  for  all  higher  sums,  not  exceed- 
ing forty  stripes. 

Drunkenness,  and  the  sale  of  liquors  of  various 
intoxicating  power,  led  to  the  greatest  number  of 
ordinances  and  penalties,  from  the  earliest  settle- 


124  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

ment  till  recent  times.  A  constant  business  of  all 
the  local  and  central  governments  was  to  license 
taverns  and  drinking-places,  and  to  regulate  "  Or- 
dinaries "  and  their  frequenters.  The  first  business 
carried  on  along  the  New  Hampshire  coast  being 
fish  catching  and  curing,  a  class  of  seamen,  as 
thirsty  as  the  proverbial  fish  itself,  frequented  the 
islands  and  seaboard  towns.  All  the  four  original 
settlements  were  maritime,  being  made  on  tidewater, 
even  as  far  inland  as  Exeter  and  Dover  ;  and  when 
lumbering  became  an  active  and  lucrative  employ- 
ment, this  also  was  carried  on  by  men  fond  of  a 
dram.  The  magistrates  and  gentry,  what  few  there 
were,  drank  wine  and  brandy  freely,  and  usually 
held  their  meetings  in  taverns,  which  were  large 
and  central  buildings,  and  long  preceded  churches. 
Innkeeping  was  a  very  respectable  occupation. 
The  founder  of  the  rich  and  powerful  Wentworth 
family  of  Portsmouth  was  Samuel  Wentworth,  who 
began  as  the  landlord  of  the  Dolphin  Inn  at  Great 
Island,  and  afterward  built  a  great  tavern  across 
the  ferry  in  Portsmouth,  which  is  still  standing,  and 
was  one  of  the  largest  structures  in  the  provincial 
capital.  Samuel  Sherburne,  head  of  another  power- 
ful Portsmouth  clan,  was  innkeeper  at  Hampton, 
succeeding  old  Robert  Tucke,  the  Englishman,  from 
whom  so  many  of  the  New  England  and  New  York 
people  are  descended  ;  and  Henry  Roby,  one  of  the 
subservient  justices  in  the  Cranfield  and  Barefoot 
despotism,  was  a  taverner  in  another  part  of  Hamp- 


EARLY  LAWS   AND   CUSTOMS  125 

ton.  The  supply  of  beverages  was  large,  and  came 
in  from  the  Azores,  the  Canaries,  and  from  Spain, 
with  which  the  New  Hampshire  fishmongers  soon 
got  a  profitable  trade  by  exchanging  salt  fish  (much 
used  in  Catholic  countries)  and  pipestaves  for  the 
Spanish  wine  and  French  brandy  that  went  into 
the  pipes  put  together  from  the  Pascataqua  staves. 
Much  of  the  early  revenue  of  the  colony  came  from 
a  tariff  on  wine  and  liquors,  or  from  fees  paid  by 
the  men  licensed  to  sell  them.  In  due  time,  rum 
from  the  West  Indies  was  added  to  the  intoxicants, 
and  gin  from  Holland ;  while  beer,  mead,  cider, 
and  perry  were  home-made  drinks.  The  beverage 
made  from  pears  figures  in  one  of  those  amusing 
incidents  with  which  the  career  of  Walter  Barefoot 
is  variegated,  from  his  first  appearance  as  a  neigh- 
bor of  the  gentle  Captain  Champernown,  kinsman 
of  Raleighs  and  Gilberts,  in  1657,  when  this  chi- 
rurgeon  had  newly  come  over,  until  he  disappears 
by  death  in  1689.  In  1675,  before  he  had  become 
a  magistrate,  and  when  living  at  Dover,  the  Hamp- 
ton marshal,  Christopher  Palmer,  a  son-in-law  of 
Edward  Hilton,  and  father-in-law  of  the  Sherman 
of  Watertown  from  whom  so  many  famous  modern 
men  descended,  went  up  the  Pascataqua  to  arrest 
Dr.  Barefoot.  Concealing  his  real  mission,  Palmer 
induced  the  doctor  to  go  to  the  Dover  jail,  and  re- 
lease from  arrest  two  of  the  Hiltons,  who  were 
lodged  there.  The  jovial  doctor  took  along  a  gallon 
of  perry  to  drink  the  health  of  the  released,  and 


126  ^EW  HAMPSHIRE 

so  long  as  it  lasted  they  were  all  very  merry.  But 
presently,  as  the  jailer's  son  testified,  "  there  was 
a  great  noise,  Dr.  Barefoot  lying  on  the  ground  and 
saying  he  would  not  go,  for  he  was  in  prison  already, 
where  he  would  abide  ;  but  Christopher  Palmer 
answered  '  he  was  his  prisoner,'  pulling  him  very 
rough  and  rudely."  Palmer  himself  testified  that 
Barefoot  "  laid  himself  along  the  floor  at  the  prison, 
more  like  a  pig  than  a  captain  ; "  for  the  doctor 
claimed  that  title  too.  As  they  went  down  the  river 
toward  Hampton  prison,  where  John  Souter  received 
the  unwilling  chirurgeon,  Captain  Champernown 
offered  to  give  bail  for  his  friend,  but  was  refused  ; 
whereupon  Barefoot  read  the  Massachusetts  Puri- 
tans a  lecture  from  their  own  "  Body  of  Liberties." 
In  1664,  not  long  after  he  had  released  the 
Quaker  women  at  Salisbury,  this  incorrigible  Bare- 
foot, with  his  brother  physician,  Greenland,  was 
convicted  of  an  assault  on  two  men  in  a  tavern  at 
Newbury,  and  in  1671  he  was  fined  by  the  Mas- 
sachusetts magistrates  "■  for  his  profaneness  and 
horrid  oaths."  The  same  court  went  on  to  banisli 
him  for  alleged  desertion  of  an  English  wife,  and 
to  forbid  his  medical  practice.  In  spite  of  all  this, 
he  became  under  James  II  chief  justice  and  acting 
Governor  of  New  Hampshire,  in  which  capacity, 
as  we  saw,  he  was  visited  by  two  tall  yeomen  from 
Dover,  who  insulted  the  Governor  and  "  Proprie- 
tor "  of  the  Province  in  Barefoot's  house,  and  threw 
them  one  after  the  other  on  the  kitchen  fire,  break- 


EARLY   LAWS   AND   CUSTOMS  127 

ing  the  Governor's  ribs,  and  burning  Robert  Ma- 
son's wig.  It  will  be  inferred  that  wine,  the  mocker, 
and  strong  drink,  which  the  Bible  calls  "  raging," 
had  something  to  do  with  these  freaks  of  eminent 
citizens. 

Nevertheless,  serious  crime  was  not  common  in 
New  Hampshire,  though  the  courts  were  full  of 
indictments,  complaints,  and  counter-charges,  and 
most  of  the  leading  men  saw  the  inside  of  the  rude 
blockhouse  prisons,  sooner  or  later.  Many  offenses 
were  nominally  punishable  with  death,  but  the  ex- 
treme penalty  was  seldom  exacted.  It  is  curious 
that  in  the  first  formal  code  of  the  Province  (1680), 
while  treason  was  made  capital,  it  was  styled 
"  treason  against  the  person  of  our  Sovereign  the 
King,  State  and  Commonwealth  of  England  ;  "  as  if 
it  was  expected  that  kings  might  again  give  place 
to  a  Commonwealth,  as  at  the  death  of  Charles  I. 
Rebellion,  in  the  same  body  of  laws,  was  to  be 
punished  by  death  "  or  other  grievous  punishment." 
But  the  only  persons  tried  for  rebellion  (Edward 
Gove  and  his  followers  in  1683)  were  indicted  for 
high  treason,  and  sentenced  under  the  barbarous 
English  law,  which  was  never  carried  out,  even 
against  Gove  ;  for  the  king's  orders  were,  — 

"  That  in  all  criminal  cases,  where  the  punishment  to 
be  inflicted  upon  the  offenders  shall  extend  to  loss  of  life 
or  limb,  (the  case  of  wilful  murder  only  excepted)  the 
party  convicted  shall  either  be  sent  over  into  this  our 
kingdom  of  England,  with  a  true  state  of  liis  case  and  con- 


128  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

viction,  or  execution  shall  be  respited  until  the  case  shall 
be  here  represented  unto  us,  our  Iieirs  and  successors,  in  our 
and  their  Privy  Council,  and  orders  sent  and  returned 
therein." 

Under  this  wise  precaution,  which  sounds  as  if  it 
were  drawn  by  Halifax,  then  in  the  Privy  Council, 
Gove  was  lodged  in  the  Tower  under  strong  guard, 
at  a  cost  of  .£3  a  week,  then  allowed  greater  liberty, 
and  finally,  not  only  pardoned  by  James  II  in 
1685,  but  sent  back  to  his  family  in  Seabrook 
(where  his  grave  is),  with  orders  from  the  king 
"  authorizing  and  requiring  the  President  [Joseph 
Dudley]  of  His  Majesty's  territory  and  dominion 
of  New  England,  to  restore  the  said  Gove  to  his 
estate,  and  to  the  possession  thereof,  in  such  man- 
ner and  form  as  if  he  had  not  been  convicted." 
This  was  practically  to  annul  the  sentence,  itself 
manifestly  illegal  and  excessive,  but  urged  on  by 
Cranfield  in  order  to  get  money  out  of  the  con- 
fiscated property,  as  he  did.  Considering  the  usur- 
pations of  Cranfield,  it  is  significant  that,  in  giving 
him  instructions  at  the  outset  (May  9,  1682),  the 
only  extract  from  the  "  Book  of  Laws  of  Eng- 
land "  which  the  king  made  and  appended  to  his 
formal  orders  was  this  :  — 

"  16th  of  King  Charles  the  First  (1640).  — Be  it  like- 
wise declared  and  enacted  by  this  present  [Long]  Parlia- 
ment, that  neither  His  Majesty  nor  the  Privy  Council 
have  or  ought  to  have  any  jurisdiction,  power  or  authority 
in  any  arbitrary  way  whatsoever,  to  examine  or  draw  into 


EARLY  LAWS   AND  CUSTOMS  129 

question,  determine,  or  dispose  of  the  lands,  tenements, 
hereditaments,  goods  or  chattels  of  any  of  the  subjects 
of  this  kingdom  ;  but  that  the  same  ought  to  be  tried  and 
determined  in  the  ordinary  course  of  justice,  and  by  the 
ordinary  course  of  the  law." 

Cranfield's  removal  (disguised  under  a  leave  of 
absence)  was  brought  about  by  Halifax,  in  effect 
for  violating  this  plain  precept  of  English  law, 
passed  in  consequence  of  the  ship-money  extortions 
and  other  abuses  of  Charles  First's  reign.  And  al- 
though Andros  and  his  associates  attempted  like 
spoliations,  it  was  with  a  more  careful  attention  to 
the  forms  of  law. 

Taxation  and  currency  are  subjects  of  regula- 
tion by  law  everywhere,  even  in  Turkey,  and  they 
appear  often  in  the  statutes  of  New  Hampshire. 
The  trade  with  the  West  Indies  and  Spain  brought 
in  much  Spanish  money,  —  Spain  having  had  for 
many  years  a  monopoly  of  silver  mining  and  coin- 
ing. Our  dollar  was  the  Spanish  piece  of  eight 
reals,  and  was  extensively  used  in  Europe  as  well  as 
in  America.  It  was  legislated  into  a  variable  value 
both  in  England  and  New  England,  but  generally 
it  stood  at  six  shillings  of  English  money.  New 
Hampshire  had  no  mint,  and  that  of  Massachusetts 
was  soon  suppressed  as  an  infringement  of  English 
sovereignty.  The  New  Hampshire  currency  was 
never  wampum,  but  from  a  very  early  day  pipe- 
staves,  boards,  wheat,  and  Indian  corn,  at  rates  fixed 
by  law  from  time  to  time,  but  not  varying  greatly 


130  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

for  many  years,  until  the  extension  of  agriculture 
inland  caused  the  price  of  corn  to  fall.  Paper 
money  had  no  great  favor  in  the  small  Province, 
though  that  issued  by  Massachusetts,  after  King 
William's  Indian  war,  was  used  to  some  extent  in 
New  Hampshire.  Counterfeiters  and  clippers  of 
coin  made  their  appearance  in  the  seventeenth 
century,  but  did  not  become  troublesome  luitil  the 
period  of  the  Revolution.  Piracy  was  the  mari- 
time fashion  of  the  seventeenth  century,  disguised 
in  part  as  privateering,  and  for  a  while  not  unpop- 
ular in  Boston  and  New  York.  Charles  II  insisted 
in  1682  that  New  Hampshire  should  pass  a  strict 
law  against  piracy,  and  it  was  done,  but  the  Pro- 
vince had  not  much  need  of  its  enforcement.  Theft 
was  common,  and  was  severely  punished  ;  yet  the 
morals  of  the  people  seem  to  have  been  better  than 
in  Maine,  and  probably  no  worse  than  in  Massachu- 
setts, though  New  Hampshire  made  less  parade  of 
its  virtues.  Sexual  offenses,  not  uncommon  before 
1650,  must  have  been  increased  by  the  general 
looseness  of  English  morals  under  the  restored  Stu- 
arts. A  seaport  like  Portsmouth  facilitates  such 
vice,  and  Rev.  Stephen  Bachiler,  one  of  the  founders 
of  the  colony,  was  the  victim  there  of  a  loose  woman 
who  inveigled  him  into  a  marriage  of  pretext  in 
1647.  She  was  a  landowner  in  Maine,  by  reason 
of  a  former  marriage  with  a  man  named  Beedle, 
and  her  third  husband  was  named  Turner.  Mr. 
Bachiler  was  refused  a  divorce  by  the  Massachu- 


EARLY  LAWS  AND  CUSTOMS  131 

setts  court,  thongli  her  immorality  was  flagi-ant ; 
she  afterward  seems  to  have  got  a  divorce,  on  the 
plea  that  he  had  gone  back  to  England,  —  which 
was  true,  —  and  had  married  there,  —  which  was 
manifestly  false,  for  in  1656,  he  was  ninety-five 
years  old.  Pier  later  life  seems  to  have  occasioned 
no  scandal.  She  was  born  in  England  about  1612, 
and  lived  until  about  1680.  Women  of  her  charac- 
ter were  numerous  on  the  Maine  sea-coast,  accord- 
ing to  the  report  of  visitors  there  and  the  records 
of  the  courts.  In  New  Hampshire  the  rapid  increase 
of  population,  as  the  settlements  moved  inland, 
shows  that  family  life  was  decent  and  normal.  The 
worst  offenders  were  olHcials  from  England,  such 
as  William  Penn  had  in  mind  in  1701  when  he 
wrote  to  Harley,  Earl  of  Oxford :  "  Unless  gov- 
ernors and  inferior  officers  are  men  of  gfood  morals 
and  character  at  home,  they  are  a  punishment  in 
lieu  of  a  benefit." 

The  customs  of  marriage  and  divorce  in  New 
Hampshire,  though  without  positive  sanction  of  law 
at  various  times,  followed  the  general  course  of 
Puritan  legislation,  by  which  marriage  was  re- 
garded as  a  civil  contract,  to  be  solemnized  by  some 
magistrate,  local  or  general.  Consequent  upon  this 
theory  was  the  corollary  that  divorce,  if  not  made 
accoixling  to  the  Jewish  law  (as  sometimes  may 
have  happened),  could  be  legalized  in  one  or  other 
of  its  forms,  by  the  legislature  or  courts  of  the 
Colony  or  Province.    Causes  of  divorce  were  recog- 


132  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

nized  in  general  or  special  laws ;  but  in  1784  tlie 
granting  of  divorce  was  taken  from  tlie  legislature 
and  made  the  privilege  of  the  highest  court  of  the 
State,  and  such  is  the  law  to-day. 

A  curious  example  of  the  survival  of  ancient  fol- 
lies in  the  law  of  England  occurred  in  two  cases  of 
manslaughter  in  New  Hampshire,  less  than  a  hun- 
dred years  after  the  cessation  of  Massachusetts 
control,  —  the  last  occurring  in  17'76.  Apparently 
following  the  criminal  code  of  Plymouth  Colony, 
under  which,  in  1654,  a  convict  named  Latham 
claimed  benefit  of  clergy  (which  exempted  him 
from  death  and  substituted  branding  in  the  hand), 
New  Hampshire  had  the  same  singular  provision. 
Whoever  could  write,  if  he  claimed  his  clergy,  and 
the  magistrate  allowed  it,  when  convicted  of  felony, 
was  branded  in  the  hand  and  then  went  forth  free. 
A  son,  slaying  his  father  in  the  town  of  Hollis, 
under  the  last  Governor  Wentworth,  pleaded  his 
clergy  before  four  judges,  and  took  the  branding. 
Soon  after,  John  Patten  of  Cliester,  having  caused 
the  death  of  Thomas  Shirley,  ancestor  of  the  juris- 
consult Shirley,  was  convicted  of  manslaughter,  but 
claimed  his  clergy,  and  went  free,  with  a  slight 
branding.  Probably  these  were  not  cases  of  legal 
folly,  but  of  justifiable  mercy,  arising  from  peculiar 
conditions  of  the  homicide,  —  the  court  availing 
itself  of  the  old  barbarism  to  avoid  a  more  unjust 
sentence.  Doubtless  unrecorded  cases  of  the  sort 
occurred  earlier. 


EARLY   LAWS   AND   CUSTOMS  133 

Except  in  the  persecution  of  Quakers,  under  the 
barbarous  laws  enacted  at  Boston  and  soon  set 
aside  by  Charles  II  ;  in  the  unjust  proceedings  of 
the  courts  under  Cranfield  (also  practically  disal- 
lowed by  Halifax  and  the  Privy  Council  under 
Charles)  ;  and  in  the  unwillingness  of  juries  to 
countenance  the  claims,  more  or  less  lawful,  of 
Mason  and  his  successor,  Allen,  few  instances  of 
perverted  justice  appear  in  New  Hampshire  history, 
but  many  of  mercy  and  judicial  good  sense. 

Music  was  somewhat  cultivated  by  the  early  in- 
habitants, and  in  the  inventory  of  Edward  Lyde,  a 
son-in-law  of  Wheelwright,  appears  "  a  pair  of  vir- 
ginals." Richard  Chamberlain,  the  moody  and  de- 
jected royal  Secretary,  was  solacing  his  griefs  with 
a  musical  instrument,  perhaps  a  rebec,  at  his  cham- 
ber on  Great  Island,  when  assailed  by  the  "  stone- 
throwing  devil "  described  in  his  "  Lithobolia,"  pub- 
lished at  London  in  1698,  after  he  had  withdrawn 
from  the  fruitless  strife  in  New  Hampshire  (carry- 
ing with  him,  it  is  to  be  hoped,  the  XlO  and 
half  a  dozen  dowlas  shirts  bequeathed  to  him,  in 
1689,  by  his  friend  Barefoot).  His  belief  in  the 
demonic  stone-throwing,  like  that  of  his  contem- 
porary, Cotton  Mather,  and  many  others,  was  com- 
plete ;  and  he  thought  very  ill  of  men  who  were 
skeptical.  To  disbelieve,  said  poor  Richard,  "  one 
must  temerariously  unhinge  and  undermine  the 
best  religion  in  the  world,  and  must  disingenuously 
quit  and  abandon  that  of  the  three  Theologic  Vir- 


134  NEW    HAMPSHIRE 

tues  or  Graces  to  which  the  great  Doctor  of  the 
Gentiles  gave  the  precedence,  —  Charity,  —  through 
his  unchristian  and  uncharitable  Incredulity."  That 
unchristian  turn  of  mind  was  not  common  then  in 
the  Province ;  for  at  the  very  outset  of  the  new  gov- 
ernment, in  1680,  good  old  John  Cutt  proclaimed 
a  fast  on  account  of  "  that  portentous  blazing  star  " 
which  had  lately  been  seen  in  the  heavens  that 
overarched  the  Pascataqua.  The  fear  of  the  Lord 
was  heavy  upon  the  Puritans,  and  accounts  for 
some  of  their  most  censurable  actions  ;  they  be- 
lieved that  God  would  require  of  them  an  account, 
not  only  of  their  own  sins,  but  those  of  their  neigh- 
bors. As  a  quaint  writer  in  1690,  R.  Daniel,  said 
to  Robert  Harley,  "  The  first  chief  planters  of  New 
England  (called  Puritans)  were  for  coactive  coun- 
sels, and  so  kept  the  people  in  awe."  And  John 
Wiswall,  writing  from  Dorchester  in  1638  to  George 
Eigby,  brother  of  that  Alexander  Rigby  who  pur- 
chased the  Plough  Patent  of  Bachiler  and  his  flock, 
praised  the  Puritans  of  Winthrop's  time,  because 
he  saw  there  "  Moses  and  Aaron,  in  church  and 
commonwealth,  to  walk  hand  in  hand,  discounte- 
nancing and  punishing  sin."  They  grasped  and 
usurped,  not  merely  for  their  own  profit  and  glory, 
but  as  they  sincerely  thought,  "  for  the  glory  of 
God  and  the  relief  of  man's  estate,"  which  Francis 
Bacon  held  to  be  the  highest  motives  to  noble  con- 
duct. 


CHAPTER  VI 

INDIAN   WARS 

In  the  history  of  any  people,  it  is  first  to  be  con- 
sidered what  inherited  traits,  or  what  external  con- 
ditions, have  imposed  on  that  people  its  peculiar 
character  from  the  beginning.  These  have  been  in- 
dicated in  the  circumstances  of  New  Hampshire's 
first  settlement,  and  the  long-continuing  controver- 
sies over  religious  opinions  and  the  tenure  of  lands. 
A  mixture  of  those  separate  races  that  coalesced 
to  form,  in  a  thousand  years,  the  composite  popula- 
tion of  Great  Britain  and  Ireland,  sent  out  scions 
of  these  races,  from  different  counties  and  regions, 
to  populate  the  sea-coast  and  river-strands  of  New 
Hampshire.  The  hardy  seamen  from  Devon  and 
Cornwall,  the  descendants  of  Danes  and  Flemings 
in  Norfolk  and  Essex,  the  Border  men  of  England 
and  Scotland,  and,  in  the  early  eighteenth  century, 
the  well-named  Scotch-Irish  from  Ulster  and  the 
large  towns  of  Ireland  and  Scotland,  —  these  were 
the  varied  rills  of  immigration  that  united  to  form 
the  tide  of  early  population  in  the  present  counties 
of  Rockingham  and  Strafford,  Divided  in  reli- 
gious faith,  or  by  the  lack  of  it,  they  were  united  in 


136  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

opposition  to  tlie  exactions  of  an  absentee  landlord 
and  the  arbitrary  rule  of  a  royal  governor  who 
lacked  the  physical  force  to  support  his  tyrannies. 
And  then  came  the  outside  pressure  of  wars  with 
Indians  and  the  French,  which  for  nearly  a  hundred 
years  kept  the  little  Province  in  a  state  of  defense 
or  aggression  to  preserve  what  it  had  got,  and  to 
make  that  more  defensible  by  extending  the  inhab- 
ited limits.  Thus  was  formed  and  welded  together 
that  tenacious  and  bold  nature  of  the  New  Hamp- 
shire people,  easily  recognized,  in  the  marked  in- 
stance of  prominent  men,  but  quite  as  discernible 
in  the  mass  of  the  population  when  some  exigency 
gave  the  occasion.  A  militia  captain,  afterwards  a 
victorious  general  in  the  Kevolution,  as  he  marched 
his  stalwart  company  toward  Boston  after  the 
opening  fight  at  Concord  and  Lexington,  was  asked 
what  and  whence  his  men  were.  With  an  oath  he 
answered,  "Full-blooded  Yankees  from  Rocking- 
ham County,  that  never  turned  their  backs  on  any 
man  yet !  "  and  it  was  allowed  to  be  a  fair  descrip- 
tion of  the  soldiers  from  Nottingham  and  Deerfield. 
Such  military  fitness  as  they  had  was  acquired  by 
descent  or  individual  practice  in  the  ever-renewed 
struggle  for  life  against  the  wily  and  harassing 
savage  and  his  French  instigators. 

While  the  colonists  of  Plymouth  and  Connecti- 
cut were  contending  against  the  Pequot  savages, 
and  gradually  approaching  the  desperate  conflict 
with  Philip,  in  which  Massachusetts  had  a  leading 


INDIAN   WARS  137 

part,  New  Hampshire  had  been  living  at  peace 
with  the  more  numerous  northern  and  eastern 
tribes,  and,  like  the  neighbors  in  Maine,  carrying 
on  a  profitable  trade  in^  furs.  No  New  Hampshire 
merchant  or  captain  had  kidnaped  Indians,  or  con- 
spicuously broken  faith  with  that  proud  race  of 
warriors.  The  early  outrages  of  this  sort  on  the 
coast  of  Maine  seemed  to  have  been  forgotten  be- 
fore 1G70 ;  but  a  subtle  ecclesiastical  influence  was 
beginning  to  urge  the  savage  to  a  kind  of  religious 
warfare  against  the  English  settlers.  Louis  XIV, 
at  the  head  of  the  aggressive  French  Catholics, 
controlled,  through  his  viceroys  and  missionary 
priests,  the  armed  colony  of  Canada,  with  its  In- 
dian and  half-breed  allies ;  and  even  before  he  en- 
gaged in  war  with  England,  he  and  his  American 
subjects  had  their  thoughts  directed  toward  the 
repression  of  Protestant  colonization,  which  was 
gradually  moving  up  the  Hudson  and  the  New 
England  rivers  toward  Canada.  What  they  had 
to  do  with  the  Indian  wars  of  1G75— 77  is  uncer- 
tain, but  there  are  indications  that  in  Maine  the 
influence  of  Catholic  traders  and  priests  was  felt 
in  keeping  up  that  contest.  In  1G77  a  document 
signed  by  nine  Abenaki  Indians,  and  making  some 
just  accusations  against  Major  Waldron  and  other 
Puritans,  seems  to  have  been  the  composition  of  one 
Diogenes  Madawaskarbet,  whose  name  implies  a 
French  Canadian  baptism.  He  said :  "  Because 
there  was   war   at   Narragansett,  you   came   here 


138  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

when  we  were  quiet,  and  took  away  our  guns,  and 
made  prisoners  of  our  chief  sagamores ;  and  that 
winter,  for  want  of  our  guns  tiiere  was  several 
starved.  Is  it  your  fashion  to  come  and  make 
peace,  and  then  kill  us  ?  Major  Waldin  do  lie  ;  we 
were  not  minded  to  kill  nobody ;  he  give  us  drink, 
and  when  we  were  drunk,  killed  us." 

Before  these  questionable  acts  of  Waldron,  how- 
ever, the  settlements  on  the  Pascataqua  and  its 
branches  were  attacked.  In  September,  1675,  some 
of  the  Abenakis  burned  houses  and  killed  men  in 
Durham,  then  called  Oyster  River,  and  waylaid  a 
man  and  his  son  going  from  Exeter  to  Hampton, 
killing  the  father,  and  capturing  a  third  Exeter 
man,  Ranlet,  who  escaped  by  help  of  a  friendly 
Indian.  They  renewed  the  attack  at  Durham  soon 
after,  burned  more  houses,  and  killed  two  men. 
Reprisals  then  began.  Some  young  men  of  Wal- 
dron's  command  went  forth  scouting  from  Dover, 
and  killed  two  Indians  out  of  five,  but  this  only 
increased  the  Indian  fury.  The  Penacooks,  a  large 
tribe  near  Concord,  remained  friendly  during 
these  scenes,  having  been  warned  by  their  old 
sachem,  Passaconaway,  and  his  successor,  Wono- 
lancet,  not  to  provoke  the  English  to  war.  The 
eastern  Indians  from  Maine  were  temporarily  re- 
duced to  peace;  but  the  tribe  and  allies  of  Philip, 
after  his  death  in  August,  1676,  strayed  northward 
and  eastward,  and  committed  murders  in  New 
Hampshire.    They  then  took  refuge  with  the  Pena- 


INDIAN  WARS  139 

cooks,  on  tlie  upper  Merrimac,  and  with  the  tribe 
around  Chocorua,  who  were  at  peace  with  the 
English.  Waklron,  an  old  Indian  trader,  had 
made  this  peace,  and  till  then,  though  merciless 
toward  the  Quakers,  he  had  been  looked  upon  by 
Indians  as  their  friend.  At  his  invitation  four  hun- 
dred of  the  tribes,  including  two  hundred  of  the 
friendly  Penacooks,  were  gathered  near  his  fortress 
in  Dover,  early  in  September,  1676.  William 
Hawthorne,  ancestor  of  the  novelist,  and  another 
Massachusetts  captain,  having  marched  to  Dover, 
proposed  to  Waldron  to  attack  these  peaceful  In- 
dians. Instead  of  that,  Waldron  contrived  a  ruse, 
by  which  he  as  major,  and  three  captains,  Haw- 
thorne, Frost,  and  Sill,  should  join  their  forces  the 
next  day,  and  capture  the  whole  body  of  savages. 
This  was  done  by  deluding  them  into  a  sham  fight, 
after  the  English  mode,  and  allowing  the  Indians 
to  fire  first,  wasting  their  powder.  The  captains 
then  closed  upon  them  with  loaded  guns,  and  cap- 
tured the  entire  company  without  bloodshed.  But 
the  Massachusetts  captains,  selecting  two  hundred 
of  the  lately  hostile  but  now  pacified  Indians,  swept 
them  away  to  Boston,  where  seven  or  eight  were  at 
once  executed  as  murderers,  and  the  rest  were  sold 
into  slavery.  As  Hubbard,  the  Puritan  historian, 
said,  "  They  had  their  lives  spared,  but  were  sent 
into  other  parts  of  the  world,  to  try  the  difference 
between  the  friendship  of  their  neighbors  here, 
and  their  service  with  other   masters  elsewhere." 


140  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

This  treachery,  coming  after  a  smaller  example  of 
the  same  sort  practiced  earlier  iu  the  year  by  one 
Laughton,  professing  to  act  under  Waldron's  au- 
thority, was  never  forgiven  by  the  Penacooks,  who 
soon  became  hostile,  like  the  Abeuakis,  Wampa- 
noags,  and  Narragansetts. 

For  the  present,  the  western  Indians  were  sub- 
dued ;  but  the  Abenakis,  who  had  driven  the  Puri- 
tan magnates  and  other  colonists  from  Saco  and 
the  Maine  towns,  kept  up  the  fight,  though  eluding 
the  winter  pursuit  of  Waldron,  Frost,  and  their 
soldiers ;  and  the  New  England  savages  were  only 
provoked  further  by  an  incursion  of  the  cruel  Mo- 
hawks from  New  York,  who  had  been  persuaded 
by  Pynchon  of  Springfield  and  Bichards  of  Hart- 
ford to  join  in  alliance  with  the  Puritans.  In  the 
spring  of  1677,  Greenland  and  North  Hampton 
were  attacked,  and  four  men  of  Hampton  were 
slain  ;  while  a  more  eminent  citizen.  Captain  Swett, 
was  killed,  a  fortnight  later,  in  a  fight  near  Black 
Point  in  Maine  (June  29,  1677).  In  August  fol- 
lowing. Sir  Edmund  Andros,  sending  soldiers  to 
Pemaquid,  kept  the  Indians  quiet ;  and  in  April, 
1678,  three  residents  near  Portsmouth,  Francis 
Champernown,  Major  Shapleigh,  and  Nathaniel 
Fryar,  made  a  humiliating  treaty  with  Squando  and 
the  Abenakis,  by  which  it  was  agreed  to  pay  trib- 
ute for  the  lands  held  by  the  colonists  in  Maine. 

So  ended  the  war  called  King  Philip's  ;  but  its 
heavy   expense   weighed   on   all   the   colonies  for 


INDIAN   WARS  141 

years.  When  it  was  over,  the  inquiry  was  raised, 
How  did  the  savages  get  their  guns  and  powder? 
articles  iu  which  it  was  forbidden  to  trade  with 
Indians  except  by  special  license.  Of  course  the 
law  was  evaded  or  defied,  as  it  had  been  by  Morton 
of  Merry  Mount  fifty  years  before  ;  but  the  Puri- 
tans, shocked  and  exasperated  (as  they  were  soon 
after)  by  the  mysterious  Popish  Plot  in  London, 
had  earlier  discovered  that  a  Catholic  gentiUiomme 
on  the  Maine  sea-coast,  the  Baron  de  Saint-Castin, 
for  whom  Castine  is  named,  had  married  an  Indian 
woman,  and  was  supplying  for  years  the  neighbor- 
ing Indians  with  weapons  and  ammunition.  This 
was  a  new  grievance  against  the  Catholics,  of 
which  much  was  heard  when  the  Bostonians  had 
imprisoned  Andros,  suspected  of  Catholic  tenden- 
cies, and  sent  him  to  England  for  trial. 

But  no  Indian  war  came  on  till  about  that  period 
when  England  freed  herself  from  a  Catholic  king, 
and  New  England  shook  off  the  yoke  of  Andros, 
Dudley,  and  Randolph.  The  flight  of  James  II 
from  England  to  France  was  soon  followed  by  war 
between  the  two  kingdoms,  and  this  led  to  incur- 
sions from  Catholic  Canada  of  French  and  Indian 
fighters,  who  burned  towns,  raided  detached  homes 
and  garrisons,  slaughtered  men,  and  carried  women 
and  children  away  to  be  sold  as  servants  and 
brought  up  as  Catholics.  They  had  been  incited 
to  this,  before  war  was  declared,  by  an  affair  in 
which  Andros  was  concerned  in  the  spring  of  1688. 


142  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

Outside  of  New  EnglanJ,  as  the  term  was  then 
used,  was  a  tract  given  to  James  II,  then  Duke  of 
York,  by  his  royal  brother,  the  bounds  of  it  over- 
lapping the  French  territory  in  which  the  Baron  de 
Saint-Castin  had  settled.  Andros,  who  governed  at 
Pemaquid  for  the  duke  (now  king),  went  in  the 
Rose  frigate  with  a  force  of  men,  and  plundered 
the  Baron's  house  and  fort,  leaving  hira  only  the 
ornaments  of  his  chapel  while  seizing  his  arms  and 
goods.  In  revenge,  he  incited  his  neighbors,  the 
Indians,  to  make  reprisals,  alleging  that  the  treaty 
of  1678  had  not  been  kept  by  the  colonists,  and 
that  the  savages  had  been  cheated  in  the  fur  trade. 
Andros  sent  an  army  against  them,  but  without 
effect.  He  garrisoned  the  forts,  however,  and  held 
the  savages  in  check  until  he  was  arrested  in  April, 
1689.  The  Puritans  then  cashiered  some  of  his 
officers,  and  allowed  the  force  of  soldiers  to  be 
diminished,  thus  inviting  attack. 

The  first  serious  onset  was  made  in  revensre  for 
Major  Waldron's  perfidy  in  1676.  More  than 
twelve  years  had  passed  since  the  friendly  Indians 
were  deluded  and  captured  by  him  at  Dover ; 
some  of  those  sold  into  slavery  had  escaped  and  re- 
turned to  their  people.  A  combination  was  formed 
between  the  Penacook  and  Chocorua  Indians  to 
visit  ujjon  Waldron  the  penalty  of  his  deceit. 
They  affected  to  be  peaceful,  but  had  murder  in 
their  hearts.  Waldron  had  no  suspicion  of  what 
was  preparing,  but  when  some  of  his  neighbors 


INDIAN   WARS  143 

expressed  tlieir  fears  of  an  outbreak,  Waldron  bade 
them  go  and  plant  tlieir  pumpkins,  and  leave  liim 
to  deal  with  the  Indians.  iSIesandowit,  a  sachem, 
was  kindly  entertained  by  the  old  Major,  and  when 
the  squaws  said  that  many  Indians  were  coming 
next  day  to  trade  with  him,  and  the  chieftain 
asked,  "Brother  Waldron,  what  would  you  do  if 
the  strange  Indians  should  come  along  with  them  ?  " 
"  I  would  lift  my  finger,"  was  the  haughty  answer, 
"  and  a  hundred  warriors  would  respond  to  my 
call."  One  squaw  lodged  in  the  fortress ;  at  night 
she  opened  the  gates,  and  many  Indians  came  rush- 
ing in.  They  made  for  the  inner  room,  where  the 
octogenarian  slept.  He  met  them  sw^ord  in  hand, 
and  drove  them  through  two  or  three  doors.  But 
while  returning  for  his  pistols,  they  came  behind 
the  old  warrior,  stunned  him  with  the  blow  of  a 
tomahawk,  dragged  him  into  his  hall,  and  seated  him 
in  his  elbow  chair  on  the  long  table  where  they  had 
eaten  food  with  him.  "  Who  shall  judge  Indians 
now?"  they  asked  him  in  mockery.  Then,  calling 
for  food,  which  the  peoj)le  in  the  house  were  forced 
to  give  them,  they  satisfied  their  hunger  before  tor- 
turing their  victim.  As  they  smote  him  with  their 
knives,  each  man  cried  out  to  the  veteran  merchant, 
"  I  cross  out  my  account."  When,  overcome  with 
pain  and  loss  of  blood,  he  was  falling  from  the 
table,  one,  more  merciful,  held  his  own  sword  under 
him,  which  ended  his  torment.  Seldom  has  the  in- 
justice of  man  been  more  unsparingly  requited. 


144  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

The  wretches  then  killed  Waldron's  son-in-law, 
Abraham  Lee,  a  chemist  of  doubtful  repute,  who 
had  been  indicted  for  making  false  money,  carried 
away  Mrs.  Lee  and  other  women  of  the  household, 
and  set  the  great  house  on  fire,  before  proceeding 
to  attack  the  lesser  garrisons,  four  of  which  were 
near  by.  Richard  Otis  was  killed  in  his  garrison, 
and  his  wife  and  child  cai'ried  off  to  a  Canadian 
nminery,  where  the  daughter  was  bred  a  Catholic. 
Mrs.  Heard's  garrison  house  was  saved  by  the  alert- 
ness and  strength  of  old  Elder  Wentworth,  pro- 
genitor of  a  distinguished  New  Hampshire  family. 
Aroused  by  the  barking  of  a  dog  just  as  the  In- 
dians were  entering,  he  pushed  them  out,  shut  the 
heavy  door,  and,  falling  on  his  back  to  avoid  bul- 
lets, held  it  with  his  feet  until  the  men  in  the  cham- 
bers were  alarmed  and  came  to  his  aid.  The  widow 
who  owned  this  house,  Elizabeth  Heard,  was  re- 
turning, unconscious  of  danger,  in  a  boat  from 
Portsmouth,  with  her  four  children,  after  nightfall. 
She  heard  alarming  sounds  as  they  neared  the  land- 
ing, and  seeing  lights  in  Waldron's  garrison,  not 
yet  set  on  fire,  the  company  betook  themselves  there 
for  refuge,  and  knocked  and  called  at  the  outer 
gate  of  the  stockade.  No  answer  coming,  a  young 
man  in  her  party  climbed  up  the  palisado,  and  saw 
an  Indian  with  a  gun  keeping  guard  in  the  house 
door.  Then  ensued  one  of  those  acts  which  enhance 
the  picture  of  savage  atrocity  with  a  gleam  of  sav- 
aue  virtue. 


INDIAN  WARS  145 

Overcome  with  friglit,  the  poor  widow  bade  hec 
children  save  themselves  and  leave  her,  helpless, 
to  her  fate.  They  obeyed  her  order,  but  no  enemy 
attacked  her.  Recovering  a  little,  she  crept  into  a 
shroud  of  bushes  in  the  garden,  and,  as  daylight 
came  on,  into  a  thicket  of  trees,  farther  away  from 
the  burning:  fortress.  She  next  saw  an  Indian  com- 
ing  toward  her  with  a  pistol,  perhaps  one  of  Wal- 
dron's ;  he  looked  at  her,  and  went  away.  Eeturn- 
ing  soon  after,  he  looked  at  her  more  earnestly. 
She  asked  him  what  he  wanted,  to  which  he  made 
no  reply,  but  ran  with  a  warwhoop  toward  the 
house  (as  if  he  had  killed  a  victim),  and  she  saw 
him  no  more.  When  the  house-roof  fell  in  and  the 
savages  withdrew,  she  stealthily  sought  her  own 
house,  and  found  all  safe.  Gathering  her  distracted 
thoughts,  she  remembered  that  in  the  fatal  treach- 
ery of  1676,  a  young  Indian,  escaping  from  the 
net  of  Waldron  and  Hawthorne,  came  running 
to  the  house,  where  she  kindly  concealed  him.  He 
then  promised  that  he  would  spare  her  and  hers 
in  any  future  war,  and  would  persuade  other  In- 
dians to  do  the  same.  This  grateful  savage  was  one 
of  the  midnight  assailants  of  Waldron,  and  Mrs. 
Heard  was  well  known  to  many  of  his  party. 

Mrs.  Heard's  daughter,  the  wife  of  John  Ham, 
returned  swiftly  down  the  river  to  give  the  alarm 
at  Portsmouth,  where  Major  Waldron's  son  Rich- 
ard was  living,  —  the  same  who  narrowly  escaped 
death  in  1694,  when  Ursula  Cutt,  widow  of   the 


140  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

president,  was  killed  among  her  haymakers,  late 
in  July.  In  the  same  day,  by  messenger  from  Jus- 
tice Weare  of  Hampton,  the  son  received  a  let- 
ter from  Governor  Bradstreet  informing  the  Wal- 
drons  that  Dover  was  to  be  attacked,  and  that 
the  old  Major  was  specially  aimed  at.  The  news 
had  come  from  Penacook  to  Chelmsford  by  two 
friendly  Indians,  four  days  before  the  attack,  but 
had  been  delayed  in  reaching  Dover  till  too  late. 
Meantime,  the  savages  had  divided  their  captives, 
and  were  making  northward  by  separate  routes  to 
Canada.  One  party,  pursued  by  a  Dover  company, 
were  overtaken  near  the  White  Mountain  Notch, 
and  three  of  the  Otis  children  retaken.  But  the 
young  widow,  Grizel  Warren,  daughter  of  James 
Warren,  a  Scot,  and  an  Irish  Margaret  and  her 
baby,  Margaret  Otis,  three  months  old,  were  carried 
to  Montreal,  where  the  child,  baptized  as  Christine, 
was  educated  in  a  convent,  and  married  at  eighteen 
to  a  Montreal  carpenter,  Le  Beau.  Her  mother, 
only  twenty-seven  at  her  capture,  was  married  in 
1693  to  Philip  Robitaille,  a  cooper,  and  bore  him 
four  Catholic  children.  Christine,  at  twenty-four  a 
widow,  fell  in  love  with  Thomas  Baker,  once  a  cap- 
tive from  Deerfield,  but  in  1714  a  commissioner  to 
ransom  captives,  and  fled  with  him  to  Boston.  The 
town  of  Brookfield  made  her  a  grant  of  land,  while 
she  was  living  in  Northampton,  married  to  Captain 
Baker,  and  resuming  her  name  of  Margaret.  He 
was  the  first  representative  to  the  General  Court 


INDIAN  WARS  147 

from  Brookfield,  in  1719,  bat  removed  to  Dover, 
his  wife's  native  town,  in  1734.  There  Mrs.  Bakei", 
her  husband  being  an  invalid,  asked  and  got  per- 
mission from  the  New  Hampshire  Assembly  to 
keep  a  public  house,  while  the  Massachusetts  Gen- 
eral Court  gave  her  five  hundred  acres  in  Maine, 
"  under  the  care  of  Colonel  William  Pepj)errell," 
—  on  the  profits  of  which,  and  of  her  inn,  she  lived 
to  the  age  of  eighty-four.  She  left  three  Catholic 
children  in  Canada,  and  in  New  Hampshire  a  large 
posterity,  —  living,  says  her  obituary,  "  in  good 
reputation,  being  a  pattern  of  industry,  prudence 
and  economy,  and  meeting  death  with  calmness."  ^ 
Such  was  the  romance  of  Indian  warfare  in  New 
Plampshire.  But  the  terrible  loss  and  suffering  it 
brought  can  hardly  be  imagined.  In  this  one  raid 
upon  Dover  23  inhabitants  were  slain  and  29  cap- 
tured ;  while  in  the  nine  years  following,  at  least 
150  were  killed  and  wounded,  and  100  more  taken 
captive.  A  loss  of  300  in  ten  years,  out  of  a  pop- 
ulation of  less  than  10,000,  besides  as  many  more 
killed  in  battle  or  upon  long  marches,  together 
with  the  ruin  of  homes  and  farms,  and  the  heavy 
cost  of  defense  and  attack,  —  these  facts  indicate 

^  See  the  very  thorough  and  interesting'  volume  by  Miss  Alice 
Baker,  True  Stories  of  New  England  Captives  (Cambridge,  1897). 
She  covers  seventy  years  with  her  researches,  and  brings  out  the 
striking  fact  that  Esther  Wheelwright  (great-granddaughter  of 
Rev.  John  Wheelwright),  as  Mother  Superior  of  French  nuns, 
assisted  at  the  burial  of  Montcalm,  and  cared  for  the  wounded  of 
Wolfe's  army.    Her  capture  was  in  1703. 


148  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

what  the  poor  Province  had  to  endure  from  1688 
to  1698.  Upon  the  renewal  of  the  French  war 
in  1703,  incursions  from  Canada  and  the  Maine 
and  New  Hampshire  wilderness  began  again,  and 
this  war  also  lasted  for  ten  years,  being  known 
as  "  Queen  Anne's  war,"  while  the  earlier  one  was 
"  King  William's."  In  neither  did  the  colonists,  at 
least  in  New  Hampshire,  get  any  effective  aid  from 
England.  A  fourth  war,  beginning  in  a  sporadic 
way  in  1721,  continued  till  1725,  New  Hamp- 
shire and  Maine  being  the  chief  sufferers.  In  1744 
war  was  renewed,  and  lasted  till  1749,  with  many 
Indian  atrocities  ;  a  final  conflict  with  the  united 
French  and  Indian  foes  lasted  from  1754  till  1761, 
though  practically  ended  for  New  England  by  the 
capture  of  Quebec  by  Wolfe  in  1759.  In  this  war 
the  great  talents  of  John  Stark  were  first  brought 
to  public  notice. 

The  later  wars,  involving  two  captures  of  Louis- 
bourg  and  the  campaigns  of  Ticonderoga  and  Que- 
bec, will  be  treated  in  connection  with  the  civil  and 
social  history  of  the  Province  before  the  Revolution. 
But  the  impressive  fact  about  all  these  Indian 
conflicts  is  that,  in  spite  of  losses  and  slaughter, 
the  colonists  pressed  on  their  work  of  pushing  the 
deadly  frontier  farther  back,  and  building  up  a 
Christian  commonwealth  in  the  shadow  of  the  ever- 
receding  forest.  Mountains  were  no  obstacle  to  the 
courage  and  persistence  of  the  New  Hampshire 
pioneers,  especially  after  they  were  reinforced  by 


INDIAN    WARS  149 

that  stalwart  and  pugnacious  race  from  northern 
Ireland  which  founded  the  inland  towns  of  Derry 
and  Londonderry  and  the  five  townships  around 
Monadnoc.  Kivers  and  lakes  were  an  invitation 
and  furtherance  rather  than  hindrances  ;  for  they 
furnished  pathways  through  the  forest,  to  the  set- 
tlers as  well  as  to  the  Indians,  and  their  frequent 
waterfalls  gave  the  needful  power  to  convert  the 
forest  itself  into  timber  for  villages  and  lumber 
for  export.  On  these  dashing  streams,  too,  were 
set  up  those  water-mills  which  ground  the  farmer's 
grain  and  prepared  his  home-grown  wool  and  flax 
for  the  family  clothing,  and  which  early  gave  way 
to  the  cotton-spinning,  wood-working,  and  iron-shap- 
ing industries  that  overran  the  State  in  the  nine- 
teenth centur3\  Seldom  has  a  community  illus- 
trated better  than  New  Hampshire,  in  its  first  two 
centuries  of  English  occupation,  the  brave  maxim 
that  "obstacles  are  things  to  be  overcome,"  and 
the  familiar  truth  that  hardship  and  toil  are  the 
best  discipline  for  a  colonial  people.  Well  did 
Hubbard,  the  eloquent  and  scholastic,  not  less  than 
Puritanic,  chronicler  of  early  New  England  and 
the  Indian  wars,  say  in  his  first  book,  "  It  is  with 
young  colonies  as  with  trees  newly  planted,  which 
those  winds  that  are  not  so  boisterous  as  to  blow 
down,  do  so  far  advantage  as  to  shake  them  to  a 
greater  fastness  at  the  root."  Walter  Scott,  whose 
Lowland  dialect  was  as  well  known  in  half  of  New 
Hampshire,  when  he  learned  it  in  boyhood,  as  it 


150  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

was  in  bis  Border  counties,  put  the  same  image 
into  verse  in  the  song  of  the  Highlanders,  praising 
the  pine-tree  of  their  chm  :  — 

"  Ours  is  no  sapling',  chance-sown  by  the  fountain, 
Blooming'  at  Beltane,  in  winter  to  fade  ; 
When  the  -whirlwind  has  stripjjed  every  leaf  on  the  mountain, 
The  more  shall  Clan-Alpine  exult  in  her  shade. 
Moored  in  the  rifted  rock, 
Proof  to  the  tempest's  shock,- 
Firmer  he  roots  him  the  rnder  it  blow ; 

"  Heaven  send  it  happy  dew. 
Earth  lend  it  sap  anew, 
Gayly  to  bourgeon,  and  broadly  to  grow." 

The  dismal  experiences  of  ambuscade  and  sur- 
prisal  taught  the  men  of  war  in  these  infested 
townships  the  lessons  they  afterwards  practiced 
upon  these  very  French  and  Indian  enemies,  and 
carried  Rogers  and  Stark,  Pepperrell  and  Vaughan, 
on  land,  and  tlie  seamen  of  Paul  Jones,  through 
desperate  battle  to  certain  victory. 

Hardly  a  descendant  of  the  tidewater  colonists 
of  the  seventeenth  centnry,  in  the  Province  of 
Waldron  and  Went  worth,  but  counts  among  his 
ancestors  one  or  two  victims  of  the  savage  bullet 
or  knife,  and  many  of  us  a  score  of  them.  All  New 
England  and  New  York  suffered  greatly  by  this 
warfare,  which,  however  unjustl3^it  began,  must  be 
waged  by  the  colonists  until  the  savages  and  their 
priestly  instigators  and  abetters  had  been  rendered 
powerless  for  mischief.    This  had  happened  at  the 


INDIAN   WARS  151 

close  of  tlie  war  in  which  Washington  and  Stark 
won  their  first  military  renown.  In  proportion  to 
its  population  and  wealth,  New  Hampshire  endured 
the  most,  and  profited  the  most  thereby,  in  tough- 
ening the  fibre  of  her  people.  The  story  is  long 
and  thrilling  ;  as  a  result,  hardly  an  Indian  re- 
mained in  the  Province  in  1770,  except,  perhaps, 
an  enslaved  captive. 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE   FESTAL   STRUGGLE   WITH  MASSACHUSETTS 

It  has  often  been  observed  that  the  sharpest  dis- 
putes are  with  members  of  the  same  family.  Wen- 
dell Phillips  used  to  say,  "  You  can  safely  speak  ill 
of  a  man  to  his  cousin  ;  "  and  there  have  been  irre- 
concilable antipathies  between  sisters.  Massachu- 
setts and  her  elder  but  smaller  Colony  can  hardly 
be  styled  sisters,  at  least  until  they  both  came  into 
the  confederacy  against  Britain  ;  they  were  more 
like  the  city  cousin  and  the  country  cousin,  out- 
wardly on  good  terms,  but  not  rapturously  fond  of 
each  other.  While  the  Puritans  controlled  New 
Hampshire,  they  treated  her  with  alternate  kindness 
and  severity  ;  she  must  not  endanger  their  Com- 
monwealth by  allowing  heresy  or  disrespect  to  ma- 
gistrates. To  the  latter  form  of  dissent  Massachu- 
setts was  peculiarly  sensitive.  Her  authorities  were 
in  power  by  God's  ordinance,  as  much  as  kings 
were  held  by  the  Cavaliers  to  be,  and  must  be 
treated  as  "  worshipful,"  —  the  common  term  of  ad- 
dress. When  the  ministers  sought  a  like  privilege, 
they  were  reminded,  gently  or  forcibl}^  that  their 
power  was  from  men,  though  their  call  might  be 


FINAL  STRUGGLE  WITH  MASSACHUSETTS     153 

from  God ;  chosen  by  their  church,  they  were  not 
its  dictators.  New  Hampshire  was  from  the  first  a 
little  rebellious  in  this  point ;  there  was  more  of 
the  stubborn  Englishman,  and  less  of  the  elect  of 
Heaven,  in  the  mien  of  her  willful  people  toward 
rulers.  Geneva  had  failed  to  shape  their  mind 
after  Calvin's  model  so  completely  as  in  the  Boston 
colony.  A  common  distrust  of  arbitrary  power  in 
the  Stuarts  drew  the  two  colonies  together  after  the 
Restoration,  but  New  Hampshire  men  thought 
Massachusetts  was  granting  away  their  wild  lands 
too  freely.  When  the  Stuart  power  was  broken  in 
1688—89,  there  was  a  strong  inclination  of  the  ori- 
ginal towns  to  reunite  with  Massachusetts.  Singu- 
larly, this  inclination  was  thwarted  by  the  dissent 
of  Hampton,  which  had  been  a  step-child  of  Boston. 
Nathaniel  Weare,  then  the  leading  citizen  of  that 
town,  having  been  the  instrument,  in  England,  of 
defeathig  the  tyranny  of  Cranfield  and  releasing 
his  townsmen  from  prison  and  from  fines,  could  not 
quite  decide  in  1689  to  join  the  other  three  towns 
in  a  final  submission  to  Massachusetts,  though  a 
temporary  union  was  formed. 

Before  this  an  effort  was  made  to  reconstitute 
the  provincial  government  by  popular  elections  in 
the  four  towns,  all  of  which  chose  commissioners 
in  October  and  December,  1689,  who  met  in  Ports- 
mouth January  24,  1690,  and  prepared  a  simple 
constitution,  —  the  first  by  popular  initiative  ever 
submitted  to  the  people  for  adoption.   The  conven- 


154  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

tion  held  for  this  purpose  was  made  up  of  the  lead- 
ing men  in  each  town,  and  they  were :  — 

For  Exeter^  Kobert  AVadleigh,  William  Hilton, 
Samuel  Leavitt,  Jonathan  Thing. 

For  Harnpton,  Henry  Green,  Nathaniel  Weare, 
Samuel  Sherburne,  Edward  Gove,^  Henry  Dow, 
Morris  Hobbs. 

For  Dover,  Captain  John  Woodman,  Captain 
John  Gerrish,  Lieutenant  John  Tuttle,  Lieutenant 
John  Roberts,  Mr.  Thomas  Edgerly,  Mr.  Nicholas 
Follet. 

For  Fortsmovth,  Major  William  Vaughan,  Cap- 
tain John  Pickering,  Mr.  Richard  Waldron,  Mr. 
Robert  Elliott,  Mr.  Nathaniel  Fryar,  Mr.  Thomas 
Cobbett. 

The  names  of  these  twenty-two  men  are  signed  to 
the  draft  of  a  Constitution,  only  one  copy  of  which 
is  known  to  exist,  as  follows  :  — 

ABSTRACT 

Agreed,  That  a  President  and  Council  consisting  of 
ten  persons,  as  also  a  Treasurer  and  Secretary,  be  chosen 
in  the  Province,  In  manner  and  form  following,  viz.  For 
the  Council, 

Three  persons  of  the  inhabitants  of  Portsmouth,  three 
of  the  inhabitants  of  Hampton,  two  of  the  inhabitants 
of  Dover,  and  two  of  the  Inhabitants  of  Exeter ;  which 

^  This  was  the  former  prisoner  in  the  Tower,  who  joined  with 
his  fellow-citizens  now  in  a  plan  of  self-grovernment.  The  next 
summer  he  was  chosen  a  lieutenant  of  the  Hampton  foot  company 
(the  same  that  had  arrested  him  in  1083),  with  Samuel  Sherburne 
as  his  captain,  who  was  slain  by  Indians  in  K>t)l. 


FINAL  STRUGGLE  WITH  MASSACHUSETTS    155 

persons  shall  be  chosen  by  the  major  vote  of  the  Inhabit- 
ants of  the  Town  where  they  live  ;  and  the  President, 
Treasurer  and  Secretary  by  the  major  vote  of  the  whole 
Province  ; 

Which  President  shall  also  have  the  power  over  the 
Militia  of  the  Province  as  Major. 

And  the  President  and  Council  so  chosen,  or  the 
major  part  of  them,  shall  with  all  convenient  speed  call 
an  Assembly  of  the  Representatives  of  the  people,  not 
exceeding  three  from  one  town  ; 

Which  said  President  and  Council,  or  the  major  part 
of  them  (whereof  the  President  or  his  Deputy  to  be 
one),  together  with  the  Representatives  aforesaid,  or  the 
major  part  of  them,  from  time  to  time  shall  make  such 
Acts  and  Orders,  and  exert  such  power  and  authority  as 
may  in  all  respects  have  a  tendency  to  the  preservation 
of  peace,  punishment  of  offenders,  and  defence  of  His 
Majesty's  subjects  against  the  common  enemy  : 

Provided,  they  exceed  not  the  bounds  his  late  Ma- 
jesty, King  Charles  II,  was  graciously  pleased  to  limit,  in 
his  Royal  commission  to  the  late  President  and  Council 
of  this  Province. 

(Signed  as  above.) 

Portsmouth,  January  24,  1689-90. 

Hampton,  suspecting  that  under  this  constitu- 
tion the  gentlemen  of  Portsmouth  would  exercise 
too  much  authority,  finally,  in  February,  1690,  re- 
fused to  choose  its  three  Councilors  and  three  Repre- 
sentatives, and  so  this  promising  plan  failed.  Imme- 
diately a  petition  was  drawn  up  and  hastily  signed 
by  most  of  the  framers  of  the  Constitution,  and 


156  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

several  hundred  others,  asking  Massachusetts  to 
assume  the  government,  as  before  1679.  Nathaniel 
Weare  was  not  well  pleased  with  this,  and  wrote 
to  his  friend,  Major  Pike,  about  it.  His  letter  is  as 
dark  and  confused  as  a  speech  of  Sir  Harry  Vane, 
but  the  upshot  of  his  long  discourse  to  his  neighbor 
Pike  (March  15,  1690)  was,  "  Let  us  wait  and  see 
what  is  best  to  do  permanently."  The  effect  of 
waiting  was  that  Samuel  Allen,  who  had  purchased, 
as  he  supposed,  the  right  of  the  Masons  to  the  fee 
simple  of  lands  in  the  Pi'ovince,  not  otherwise 
owned,  got  himself  nominated  Governor  by  the 
king,  and  made  his  son-in-law,  John  Usher,  his 
Lieutenant-Governor ;  while  Weare,  than  whom  no 
citizen  was  more  suitable,  became  a  member  of  the 
Council.  It  is  noticeable  that  this  Usher,  who  had 
bought  the  title  to  Maine  from  the  heirs  of  Gorges, 
and  was  one  of  the  owners  of  the  large  Merrimac 
purchase  from  Mason,  for  mining,  etc.,  had  now  be- 
come virtually  the  head  of  the  Province,  while  his 
father-in-law  was  its  titular  owner  and  governor. 
This  disaffected  the  people,  who  had  again,  ere  the 
Massachusetts  Charter  was  granted,  petitioned  King 
William  to  include  the  Province  in  Massachusetts. 
But  the  king  had  inherited  some  of  the  prejudice 
of  his  uncle  and  father-in-law  against  the  Puritans  ; 
his  theory  of  government  required  that  the  colonies 
should  be  more  directly  controlled  by  the  king  ; 
and  the  money  of  Allen  was  doubtless  used  about 
the  Court  to  his  own  advantage. 


FINAL  STRUGGLE  WITH  MASSACHUSETTS    157 

The  confidence  of  the  people  in  Usher  seems 
never  to  have  been  restored ;  tlie  Council  held  a 
majority  of  the  former  opponents  of  Mason,  al- 
though they  sometimes  allowed  Usher's  measures 
to  pass.  Weare,  Vauglian,  and  the  surviving  Rich- 
ard Waldron  (called  Colonel,  to  distinguish  him 
from  his  father)  usually  voted  together,  as  they 
had  labored  together  twenty  years  before,  against 
Cranfield  and  Barefoot.  Usher  and  one  of  the 
Council,  Ilincks,  had  been  in  the  hated  council  of 
Andros,  which  added  to  the  feeling  against  them. 
The  lieutenant-governor  published  his  commission 
and  took  up  the  administration  August  13,  1692, 
but  from  the  first  met  with  opposition.  His  manner 
was  far  from  conciliatory  ;  his  education  was  not  on 
a  level  with  his  wealth,  and  he  had  a  high  notion 
of  his  own  importance.  lie  was  superseded  in  office 
in  1696  by  William  Partridge,  for  whom  the  people 
had  petitioned  ;  but  Usher  claimed  to  hokl  the 
place,  and  did  so  at  intervals  until  the  arrival  of 
Lord  Bellomont  as  Governor  of  Massachusetts  and 
New  Hampshire  in  1700.  Partridge  then  held  the 
])lace  unopposed,  the  courts  were  reconstituted,  and 
Allen,  who  had  come  over  from  London  in  1698, 
and  for  a  year  took  his  place  as  Governor,  now  re- 
tired from  public  office,  together  with  his  son-in- 
law,  and  next  appeared  in  the  new  courts  as  a  claim- 
ant for  rents  and  the  possession  of  unimproved 
lands.  Allen  died  in  1705,  leaving  his  widow,  a 
resident  of  Hampton,  and  his  son  Thomas  to  prose- 


158  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

cute  his  case  iu  the  local  courts,  with  only  a  right 
of  appeal  to  Queen  Anne,  in  case  of  a  special  ver- 
dict ;  and  this  the  juries  refused  to  give.  Before 
this  Allen  had  himself  pressed  the  case  to  a  verdict, 
in  a  court  made  up  of  the  judges  who  opposed  his 
claim  ;  the  jury,  in  1700,  giving  a  verdict  against 
him,  in  favor  of  the  defendant.  Colonel  Richard 
Waldron,  who  represented  many  owners  and  occu- 
piers of  the  lands  which  Mason  had  claimed,  and 
which  Allen,  as  his  assignee,  now  claimed.  From  this 
verdict  Allen  appealed,  hut  the  judges,  following 
the  precedent  of  Massachusetts,  denied  the  appeal 
to  King  William. 

This  denial  was  taken  very  ill  by  the  king ;  and 
the  Lords  of  Trade,  in  a  letter  to  Lord  Bellomont 
the  Governor  (April  24,  1701),  said:  "This  de- 
clining to  admit  appeals  to  his  Majesty  in  Council 
is  a  matter  which  you  ought  very  carefully  to  watch 
against  in  all  your  governments.  It  is  an  humor 
that  prevails  so  much  in  proprieties  and  charter 
colonies,  and  the  independency  they  thirst  after 
is  now  so  notorious,  that  it  has  been  thought  fit 
those  considerations,  together  with  other  objections 
against  those  colonies,  should  be  laid  before  the 
Parliament,  A  bill  has  thereupon  been  brought 
into  the  House  of  Lords  for  reuniting  the  right  of 
government  in  their  colonies  to  the  Crown."  The 
measure  was  aimed  at  Massachusetts  and  its  neigh- 
bors having  charters,  and  at  the  proprietary  colo- 
nies  of    Pennsylvania,   Maryland,   and   Carolina, 


FINAL  STRUGGLE  WITH  MASSACHUSETTS    159 

especially.  It  was  defeated,  largely  by  the  personal 
influence  of  William  Penn,  who  was  able  to  neu- 
tralize the  waning:  influence  of  that  old  foe  of  char- 
ters,  Randolph,  and  thus  render  a  service  to  New 
England.  But  the  ill  name  of  Massachusetts  with 
William  III  was  inherited  by  his  successor,  Queen 
Anne,  and  was  handed  down  to  George  II,  in  whose 
reign  it  aided  materially  to  procure  the  final  deci- 
sion of  the  Privy  Council  against  Massachusetts  on 
the  boundary  question.  And  though,  by  that  time, 
the  wish  of  the  New  Hampshire  people  was  strongly 
against  union  with  Massachusetts,  it  is  probable 
that  the  decisive  influence  in  1737-40  on  the  Privy 
Council  came  from  persons  then  owners  of  the  old 
Mason  claim,  represented  by  the  Wentworths  and 
Atkinsons. 

In  this  long  controversy  with  the  Aliens  and 
Usher,  it  was  a  favorite  move  of  their  opponents  to 
vote  and  petition  and  talk  in  favor  of  a  close  union 
with  Massachusetts.  But  all  this  while  the  senti- 
ment for  a  separate  existence  was  growing  as  the 
Province  grew,  and  the  interest  of  the  wealthy  and 
powerful  circle,  of  which  the  Wentworths  were  the 
centre,  demanded  a  separate  government,  which 
they  should  direct.  In  the  early  dispute  with  Rob- 
ert Mason  the  Wentworths  of  that  time  had  little 
share ;  their  head  of  the  family,  Samuel  of  Great 
Island  and  Portsmouth,  was  busy  keeping  his  tav- 
erns and  increasing  his  worldly  goods  and  cousin- 
ships.    But  his  son,  John  Wentworth,  a  successful 


160  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

shipmaster  and  merchant  of  Portsmouth,  sided 
with  the  Waklrons,  Vaugiians,  and  Weares  against 
the  Aliens ;  and  when  Usher  had  finally  vacated 
the  important  post  of  lieutenant-governor,  upon  the 
accession  of  George  I  in  1715,  George  Vaughan 
at  first,  and  two  years  after,  Wentworth,  succeeded 
to  the  office.  From  that  time  until  John  Went- 
worth, the  last  royal  governor,  abandoned  the 
Province  in  1775,  it  was  substantially  directed 
and  governed  by  the  Wentworths  and  their  kins- 
men, the  Atkinsons.  The  Governors  lived  in  Bos- 
ton until  1741,  but  the  real  power  rested  with  the 
lieutenant-governor  in  Portsmouth,  where  mercan- 
tile wealth  was  accumulating,  and  political  ambi- 
tions were  active.  Even  in  the  years  1700-07,  when 
the  great  lawsuit  was  pending  in  the  New  Hamp- 
shire court,  and  an  exhaustive  and  costly  Indian 
war  was  going  on,  as  much  wealth  seems  to  have 
been  on  the  side  of  the  planters  and  merchants  as 
on  Allen's  side. 

Just  before  Samuel  Allen's  death  in  May,  1705, 
the  New  Hampshire  Assembly  made  a  sincere  ef- 
fort to  end  the  long  dispute  by  a  compromise  with 
him.  The  Queen  had  sent  a  message  by  Governor 
Dudley,  who  succeeded  Lord  Bellomont,  "that 
nothing  will  more  tend  to  your  quiet  and  repose, 
and  to  her  Majesty's  just  satisfaction,  than  to  have 
an  amicable  and  quiet  issue  in  that  matter."  The 
Assembly  therefore  authorized  the  towns  to  choose 
each  two  freeholders,   to  join  in  convention  with 


FINAL  STRUGGLE  WITH  MASSACHUSETTS     161 

the  Assembly,  for  making  some  proposal  to  Mr. 
Allen  to  settle  the  pending  quarrel.  This  was  done, 
and  the  convention  met  at  Portsmouth.  It  re- 
solved that  the  people  had  no  "  claim  or  challenge 
to  any  part  of  the  Province  "  outside  of  four  old 
towns  of  Portsmouth,  Dover,  Hampton,  and  Exe- 
ter, and  the  new  towns  of  New  Castle  and  King- 
ston ;  and  that  they  would  allow  to  Allen  and  his 
heirs  five  thousand  acres  of  the  common  lands  in 
those  six  townships  ;  that  he  and  his  heirs  "  might 
peaceably  hold  and  enjoy  the  great  Waste,  at  the 
heads  of  the  four  towns,  containing  forty  miles  in 
length  and  twenty  in  breadth ; "  and  the  people 
would  pay  them  besides  ,£2000  current  money  of 
New  England  (about  <£1350  sterling).  On  his  part, 
Allen  was  to  quitclaim  to  the  inhabitants  and  their 
heirs  all  the  land  within  the  six  townships,  and  to 
warrant  and  defend  their  title  against  all  mortgage, 
entail,  or  other  incumbrance,  provided  the  queen 
approved  this  mode  of  settlement.  All  contracts 
made  by  either  Mason  or  Allen  "  in  their  own  just 
right "  should  be  accounted  valid ;  and  all  actions 
and  suits  in  law  concerning  the  claim  and  lands 
were  to  cease  until  the  queen's  pleasure  was  known. 
Like  the  proposition  of  Joseph  Mason  made  to 
the  Massachusetts  General  Court  half  a  century 
earlier,  this  was  a  fair  offer,  and  but  for  Allen's 
sudden  death  might  have  been  accepted,  for  it  was 
liberal  toward  him.  But  just  as  John  Mason  died 
in  1635,  as  he  was  coming  over  to  maintain  his 


162  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

right,  so  Allen  died  at  this  new  crisis  ;  the  matter 
stood  still,  and  the  widow  and  son  after  some  delay 
prosecuted  their  case  in  the  courts.  Then  ensued 
one  of  those  developments  of  fraud  and  wrong 
which  had  been  too  flagrant  on  both  sides  before. 
When  the  Aliens  in  1704  applied  to  the  Council 
for  "  the  records  of  judgments  obtained  formerly 
by  his  predecessor  Mason,  against  several  persons 
of  the  Province,"  it  was  found  that  the  book  had 
been  mutilated,  and  the  judgments  cut  out.  Next 
appeared  the  fact  that  Chamberlain,  who  kept  the 
records  from  1682  to  1689,  had  them  forcibly 
taken  from  him  at  the  Revolution  of  1689  by  Cap- 
tain John  Pickering  of  Portsmouth,  who  kept  them 
two  years,  and  then  handed  them  over  to  Usher 
and  his  secretary,  Henry  Penny,  in  1691.  The 
mutilation  (quite  similar  to  the  mutilation  of  the 
Portsmouth  town  records  by  Pendleton  and  others 
in  1652)  was  probably  done  while  the  books  were 
in  Pickering's  hands.  If  not,  it  may  have  happened 
while  William  Vaughan,  one  of  the  persons  against 
whom  the  judgments  were  given,  had  their  cus- 
tody, from  1697  to  1702.  For  Samuel  Penhallow 
testified  in  1704  that,  when  he  "received  the  book 
now  showed  (out  of  which  24  leaves  are  cut)  from 
Major  Vaughan  "  in  June,  1702,  "  in  such  form  as 
they  now  are,"  the  twenty-four  leaves  were  cut  out 
"in  the  same  manner  as  it  is  now  seen."  ^   There 

1  When,  in  July,  17T5,  Theodore  Atkinson,  then  Secretary  of 
the  Province,  and  a  Tory  (being  uncle  of  the  royal  Governor), 


FINAL  STRUGGLE  WITH  MASSACHUSETTS    163 

could  be  but  one  reason  for  defacing  the  record, 
—  to  obliterate  the  unjust  decrees  of  the  court  and 
packed  juries  in  Cranfield  and  Barefoot's  time ; 
and  this  had  manifestly  been  done.  Wicked  as 
those  verdicts  and  decrees  were,  —  and  it  was  for 
those,  in  part,  that  Halifax  had  Cranfield  censured 
and  virtually  removed,  —  they  should  have  been 
allowed  to  stand  in  the  record,  until  legally  set 
aside,  as  they  could  have  been. 

Nor  did  the  chief  landholders  and  their  service- 
able friends  stop  with  this  summary  annulment  of 
the  record.  They  procured  the  preparation  of  false 
papers  (assuming  that  the  famous  Indian  Deed  to 
Wheelwright  in  1629  was  a  forgery,  as  is  now  gen- 
erally held),  and  had  copies  of  them  pi-esented  in 
court.  The  original  of  the  Wheelwright  Deed  has 
never  been  seen,  nor  does  it  now  exist  on  the  files 
of  York  County  in  Maine,  where  it  was  said  to 
have  been  recorded.    It  first   appeared  in  a  copy 

was  called  on  by  Major  William  Weeks  of  Greenland  for  the 
Province  records,  he  declined  to  give  them  up,  unless  forced  (as 
he  was),  and  one  of  his  reasons  was,  that  in  the  troubled  times  of 
the  English  Revolution  of  16SS-89,  which  his  father  well  remem- 
bered, the  papers  then  in  the  hands  of  Richard  Chamberlain  were 
taken  away  and  became  scattered  ;  so  that  widows  and  orphans 
and  other  innocent  persons  suffered  by  not  being'  able  to  secure 
their  titles  to  property ;  and  that  many  of  these  papers  had  not 
yet  (in  17T5)  been  restored  to  the  public  oflfiees.  Yet  the  Atkin- 
sons and  Wentworths,  with  the  Waldrons,  Vaughans,  etc  ,  were 
of  the  chief  gainers  by  this  pillage  and  mutilation  of  the  Cham- 
berlain records ;  though  some  of  them  afterward  profited  by  the 
purchase  of  the  Mason  claim  from  the  last  owner  by  that  name, 
John  Tufton  Mason,  in  1740. 


1G4  NEW  HAilPSniRE 

certified  as  of  the  original  "  on  file  with  the  filer 
of  tlie  County  of  York,"  at  the  court  in  Ports- 
mouth, in  August,  1707.  It  was  put  in  by  Rich- 
ard Waldron,  one  of  the  justices  of  the  court, 
but  not  sitting  because  defendant  in  the  suit ;  and 
his  language  respecting  it  was  this  ;  "  The  said 
defendant's  possession  "  (that  of  Major  Waldron) 
"  was  grounded  on  a  very  good  Deed,  well  executed 
in  law,  from  the  Indian  Sachems  and  native  propri- 
etors of  these  parts  of  America,  bearing  date  the 
17th  of  May  1629." 

A  copy  of  the  Wheelwright  Deed  was  entered  on 
the  record  at  Exeter,  where  it  was  said  to  have 
been  made,  but  not  till  1714,  eighty-five  years  after 
its  alleged  date,  and  was  there  certified  as  "  accord- 
ing to  the  original "  by  Vaughan,  who  may  have 
had  a  hand  in  forging  it.  Where  had  it  been  in 
this  long  period?  Wheelwright,  who  should  have 
claimed  under  it,  if  genuine,  never  did  so,  nor  any 
of  his  heirs.  It  was  never  heard  of  until  every  one 
of  the  alleged  grantors,  grantees,  and  witnesses  had 
long  been  dead.  It  was  artfully  framed,  so  that  its 
genuineness  has  been  maintained  by  several  good 
antiquaries.  But  few  who  look  at  the  facts  without 
prejudice  now  doubt  that  it  was  forged,  and  in  the 
very  nick  of  time  ;  for  it  doubtless  had  some  weight 
in  the  case,  though  that  was  settled  on  other  prin- 
ciples.^   Another  paper  offered  by  Waldron  in  1707 

'  The  literature  concerning'  the  Wheelwright  Deed  is  too  vo- 
lumiuous  even  to  be  cited  here.   Dr.  Belknap  believed  it  genuine ; 


FINAL  STRUGGLE  WITH  MASSACHUSETTS     165 

is  so  manifest  a  fraud  that  nobody  defends  it,  — 
the  letter  signed  by  Neale  and  Wiggin  (dated  in 
1633),  mentioned  in  chapter  i.  In  all  this  pro- 
tracted litigation,  beginning  in  the  New  Hampshire 
court,  in  1683,  when  Barefoot,  Henry  Green,  and 
Fryar  were  justices,  and  ending  in  the  court  of 
1707,  above  mentioned,  —  both  plaintiff  and  de- 
fendant having  changed,  and  most  of  the  judges 
and  jurymen  deceased,  the  final  settlement  was 
upon  no  principle  of  law,  but  out  of  regard  to  the 
condition  of  the  people  of  the  Province,  whom  the 
Waldrons,  father  and  son,  represented.  This  pre- 
vented the  Privy  Council  from  trying  the  appeal 
taken    by  Thomas    Allen    against    the  verdict    of 

but  his  more  exact  editor,  in  1831,  John  Farmer,  did  not.  James 
Savage  first  exposed  the  forg-ery  ;  the  reasons  for  which  are  so 
obvious  that  the  generality  of  scholars  and  readers  now  agree 
with  Savage  and  Farmer.  It  was  supported  in  the  local  court  by 
various  affidavits  ;  but  these  do  not  carry  much  weight  when  the 
probabilities  are  all  the  other  way.  There  was  a  genuine  Wheel- 
wright Deed  of  IGoS,  in  Avhich  two  Indian  sagamores  did  grant  to 
Rev.  John  Wheelwright  the  thirty  miles  square  in  which  he  set 
up  his  staff  of  rest  at  Exeter,  when  driven  away  by  the  Puritans 
of  Boston.  This  was  sworn  to  as  genuine  by  Wheelwright  and 
Edward  Colcord,  two  of  the  grantees,  as  early  as  April.  1668, 
and  also  by  Rev.  Samuel  Dudley,  the  second  minister  of  Exeter. 
Had  the  other  deed  (of  1629)  existed,  there  would  have  been  no 
need  of  the  later  one,  and  these  witnesses  would  naturally  have 
mentioned  it.  It  is  for  my  interest  to  believe  the  forgery  genu- 
ine ;  for  one  of  the  five  grantees  named,  Thomas  Levitt,  is 
my  ancestor ;  but  although  he  lived  to  be  over  eighty,  he  never 
made  the  least  claim  under  it ;  any  more  than  did  his  associates, 
John  Wheelwright,  Augustine  Story,  Thomas  White,  and  William 
Wentworth. 


166  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

1707  ;  reasons  of  substantial  justice  being  allowed 
to  liave  weight,  and  the  technicalities  of  English 
law  disregarded. 

Indeed,  by  1720,  the  injury  feared  in  the  little 
Province  from  the  exactions  of  Mason  and  his  suc- 
cessor was  quite  overshadowed  by  the  bolder  and 
more  dangerous  claim  of  Massachusetts.  Still  ad- 
hering to  her  old  theory  that  the  southern  boundary 
of  New  Hampshire  must  follow  the  Merrimac,  as 
its  course,  traced  upward,  changed  from  east  and 
west  to  southeast  and  northwest,  the  Puritan  col- 
ony, having  swallowed  up  Plymouth  and  Maine,  was 
granting  towns  and  exercising  jurisdiction  in  a  con- 
siderable part  of  what  are  now  Rockingham  and 
Hillsborough  counties,  and  the  whole  of  Cheshire, 
—  thus  shutting  up  New  Hampshire  to  a  small  seg- 
ment between  the  actual  Merrimac  and  the  Maine 
border.  Not  much  notice  was  taken  of  this  while 
English  tyranny  and  Indian  warfare  occupied  the 
minds  of  the  New  Hampshire  planters  ;  but  as  the 
Province  grew  in  numbers  and  wealth,  they  resisted 
the  usurpation  of  their  encroaching  neighbor.  No 
longer  desirous  of  annexation  to  Massachusetts, 
the  majority,  in  1730,  when  Jonathan  Belcher,  a 
rich  Boston  merchant,  for  a  time  resident  in  Eng- 
land, succeeded  Bishop  Burnet's  son  William,  as 
Governor  of  the  two  colonies,  were  ready  to  take 
offense  at  any  partiality  of  the  great  man  to  his 
native  colony  or  his  private  friends  in  New  Hamp- 
shire.   In  1726,  under  the  popular  lieutenaut-gov- 


FINAL  STRUCxGLE  WITH  MASSACHUSETTS    167 

ernor,  John  Wentworth,  ill  feeling  was  aroused 
about  the  large  grants  of  land  made  by  Massachu- 
setts in  the  territory  now  New  Hampshire,  and  then 
claimed  by  Wentworth  and  the  Assembly,  in  an 
appeal  to  the  king  to  establish  a  boundary  line  be- 
tween the  two  colonies. 

New  Hampshire  retaliated  by  granting  other 
townships  in  the  same  territory ;  and  secured  court 
favor  in  England  by  voting  her  Governor  a  fixed 
salary,  as  Massachusetts  would  not.  This  did  not 
prevent  the  appointment  of  Belcher,  who,  it  was 
argued  in  England,  being  a  native  of  Massachu- 
setts, could  bring  that  stiff-necked  people  to  terms. 
Nor  did  John  Wentworth  oppose  Belcher's  appoint- 
ment, though  he  would  have  preferred  Shute,  a 
former  governor,  and  did  prefer  Burnet,  who  held 
the  office  but  a  few  months,  and  took  a  strong 
prejudice  against  the  Puritans,  as  contrasted  with 
his  fellow-subjects  in  New  York  and  New  Hamp- 
shire. Belcher,  in  the  mean  time,  instead  of  concili- 
ating the  powerful  Wentworth  interest,  broke  with 
his  lieutenant-governor,  and  formed  a  faction  of  his 
own  in  New  Hampshire,  at  the  head  of  which  was 
the  third  Richard  Waldron,  grandson  of  the  Major; 
a  person  of  more  education  than  propriety  of  speech 
and  conduct,  if  we  may  judge  by  his  correspond- 
ence with  Governor  Belcher.  John  Wentworth 
soon  died,  leaving  an  excellent  reputation,  and  a 
son,  Benning,  afterward  Governor,  whose  abilities 
were  greater,  but  his  manners  not  so  agreeable,  and 


168  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

his  temper  more  imperious.  He  had  not,  however, 
the  petty  traits  that  appear  constantly  in  Belcher's 
public  and  private  papers ;  while  his  connection 
and  alliances  with  the  Atkinsons,  Plaisteds,  and 
his  own  Wentworth  cousins,  gave  him  great  social 
and  political  influence.  He  was  brought  up  a  mer- 
chant, like  Belcher,  and  had  resided  in  Spain, 
against  which  country,  soon  at  war  with  England, 
he  held  large  claims,  which  gave  him  importance 
in  England.  His  manners  were  said  by  his  ene- 
mies to  be  haughty  and  reserved,  like  the  typical 
Spaniard's ;  and  Belcher  and  Waldron,  in  their 
scurrilous  correspondence,  nicknamed  him  "  Don 
Diego." 

New  Hampshire  had  a  real  grievance  against 
Massachusetts  in  the  boundary  affair ;  for  the 
strong  Massachusetts  towns,  claiming  limits  which 
encroached  on  the  young  and  feeble  settlements  of 
New  Hampshire,  would  arrest  men  for  refusing  to 
pay  taxes  in  the  neighboring  colony.  The  Went- 
worths  and  Atkinsons  placed  themselves  at  once  at 
the  head  of  the  party  which  demanded  immediate 
decision  of  the  boundary  questions.  And  it  was 
their  money,  advanced  as  a  loan  or  given  as  a  bribe, 
which  finally  turned  the  scale  in  favor  of  New 
Hampshire.  The  Lords  of  Trade  early  favored 
New  Hampshire,  as  Belcher  thought,  and  very 
likely  with  truth.  Years  after  the  boundary  should 
have  been  fixed  the  final  decision  came,  —  Mas- 
sachusetts deferring   or  neglecting  the   measures 


FINAL  STRUGGLE  WITH  MASSACHUSETTS     169 

needful  to  settle  the  dispute.  It  was  offensive  to 
the  powers  in  England  to  be  thus  held  off  by  a  col- 
ony which  had  never  stood  too  well  at  Court,  from 
Charles  I  down  to  George  II,  and  which  George  III 
was  soon  to  find  even  harder  to  manage.  New 
Hampshire  was  nioi'e  fortunate  in  her  agents,  and 
the  simplicity  and  liberality  of  her  people  won  her 
friends  in  England,  when  attention  could  be  given 
to  so  small  and  remote  a  province.  Her  ship-tim- 
ber, too,  was  an  Important  article  in  the  affairs  of 
a  naval  kingdom  like  England  ;  while  Massachu- 
setts was  looked  upon  as  a  rival  rather  than  a  cus- 
tomer by  the  shopkeeping  nation  which  England 
was  fast  becoming.  Compared  with  New  Hamp- 
shire, she  was  large  and  mercantile  ;  while  the  col- 
ony of  the  Wentworths,  though  governed  by  mer- 
chants, was  chiefly  rural  and  pastoral,  with  a  strong 
element  of  foresters,  trappers,  and  lumbermen.  The 
number  of  her  towns  in  1732  was  less  than  twenty- 
five,  and  a  third  part  of  these  were  made  by  divid- 
ing the  old  towns  ;  for  population  pushed  but  slowly 
into  the  wilderness,  so  long  as  Indian  fighting  was 
frequent.  One  part  of  the  grievance  against  Mas- 
sachusetts was  that  the  towns  she  granted  and  set- 
tled were  those  less  likely  to  be  attacked  by  sav- 
ages, because  the  unquestioned  New  Hampshire 
towns  stood  between  the  southern  townships  and 
danger. 

Finally,  in  1737,  the  Privy  Council  decided  that 
the  southern  boundary  of    New   Hampshire  must 


170  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

run  west  and  not  northwest,  and  the  two  colonies 
were  asked  to  have  the  line  established  on  that 
theory.  Massachusetts  still  held  off,  but  the  work 
went  on  without  her.  It  was  completed  in  1741, 
and  ever  since  the  area  of  New  Hampshire  has 
been  respectable,  —  something-  more  than  nine  thou- 
sand square  miles. 

The  closing  months  of  this  contest  were  marked 
by  a  singular  intrigue,  in  which  Massachusetts, 
through  Edward  Hutchinson,  became  injuriously 
prominent.  Having  neglected  to  purchase  the  claim 
of  the  Masons  when  to  do  so  might  have  prevented 
harm  and  loss  to  all  parties,  Massachusetts  now 
began  to  tamper  with  the  great-grandson  of  Robert 
Mason,  in  whom  the  title  had  been  found  to  rest, 
in  consequence  of  a  flaw  in  the  legal  proceedings 
by  which  Allen  became  the  owner.  The  Massachu- 
setts agents  now  encouraged  this  John  Tufton  Ma- 
son, a  grandson  of  Catharine  Tufton  or  Mason,  who 
was  a  niece  and  legatee  of  Walter  Barefoot,  to  as- 
sert his  claim  (for  which  his  grandfather  had  been 
paid  by  Allen),  and  quitclaim  to  Massachusetts 
some  twenty-four  thousand  acres  which  it  was  fore- 
seen the  line,  wlien  established,  would  transfer  to 
New  Hampshire  in  the  border  towns  of  Salisbury, 
Amesbury,  Haverhill,  Methuen,  and  Dracut.  He 
was  also,  under  Massachusetts  tuition,  to  bring  for- 
ward his  revived  claim  as  a  means  of  defeating 
New  Hampshire.  This  scheme  being  mentioned  to 
the  king's  solicitor,  he  advised  Mason  and  Massa- 


FINAL  STRUGGLE  WITH  MASSACHUSETTS    171 

chusetts  not  to  bring  it  forward,  lest  the  Lords  of 
Trade  should  think  it  an  artifice  to  perplex  the 
main  cause. 

Indeed,  the  whole  course  of  Massachusetts,  and 
of  the  Governor  of  the  two  Provinces,  was  dilatory, 
crooked,  and  unstable ;  while  the  New  Hampshire 
people,  represented  in  their  popular  Assembly  (for 
the  Council  and  Secretary  Waldron  sided  with 
Belcher),  pressed  forward  with  zeal,  sent  capable 
agents  to  London,  and  dealt  plainly  and  promptly 
with  the  colonial  commission  appointed  by  the 
king,  from  Nova  Scotia,  Rhode  Island,  and  New 
York.  This  met  in  the  summer  of  1737,  and  gave 
an  evasive  decision,  from  which  both  sides  appealed 
to  the  king.  It  was  after  this  appeal  that  Hutchin- 
son, for  Massachusetts,  intrigued  with  the  younger 
Mason,  and  was  obliged  to  give  up  his  scheme. 
But  before  this,  Massachusetts  had  dealt  with 
some  duplicity  in  regard  to  the  original  Mason 
charter,  and  had  apparently  left  suspicion  in  the 
mind  of  the  Privy  Council  that  her  claim  had  little 
real  foundation.  This  suspicion  was  increased  by 
the  obstructive  and  capricious  course  of  Belcher, 
and  the  result  was,  not  only  to  give  New  Hamp- 
shire more  territory  than  she  would  have  com- 
promised on  twenty  years  before,  but  to  occasion 
the  removal  of  Belcher  from  both  his  govern- 
ments. He  was  succeeded  in  New  Hampshire,  thus 
enlarged  in  area,  by  Benning  Wentworth,  son  of 
the  late  lieutenant-governor,  and  in  Massachusetts 


172  NEW   IIAMrSHIRE 

by  William  Shirley.  Both  were  the  superiors  of 
Belcher  in  executive  ability,  tact,  and  a  certain  as- 
pect of  integrity,  which  in  \A'entwortirs  case  may 
not  have  covered  greater  virtue  than  did  the  trim- 
ming and  suspicious  character  of  Belcher.  Went- 
worth's  appointment  was  directly  due  to  the  Duke 
of  Newcastle,  who,  in  the  comjjlications  of  the 
Spanish  war  (which  Walpole  was  forced  to  declare 
by  the  opposition  of  Newcastle  and  others  of  his 
former  supporters),  had  come  vmder  obligations  to 
Wentworth,  with  his  heavy  claims  against  Spain. 
Non-payment  by  Spain  (which  was  one  of  the 
causes  of  war)  had  made  Wentworth  banki-upt, 
and  his  creditors  were  London  merchants.  They 
aided  his  friends  in  New  Hampshire  to  get  the 
separate  governorship  for  him,  and  paid  <£300 
for  fees  and  bribes  in  that  affair,  which  Atkinson 
and  the  Wentwoiihs  afterward  repaid.  The  new 
Governor  returned  from  England  with  his  commis- 
sion in  1741,  and  took  office  December  13  in  that 
year ;  he  then  called  an  assembly  from  thirteen 
towns,  to  meet  January  13, 1742,  and  twenty  repre- 
sentatives appeared.  In  his  first  speech  he  con- 
gratulated them  on  the  settlement  of  "  the  tedious 
dispute  with  the  Massachusetts  Bay,  which  has 
subsisted,  in  one  shape  or  another,  upwards  of 
threescore  years;"  and  wont  on  to  say  that  the  sep- 
aration of  the  two  provinces  was  "  an  event  which, 
if  rightly  improved,  will,  under  the  direction  of 
Heaven,  be  a  lasting  advantage ;  will  be  a  means 


FINAL  STRUGGLE  WITH  MASSACHUSETTS     173 

of  replenishing  your  towns  witli  people,  of  extend- 
ing and  enlarging  your  commerce." 

It  did  have  that  effect ;  and  it  also  led  to  the 
rapid  granting  of  new  towns  by  Weutworth,  and 
their  settlement,  after  King  Geoi-ge's  war  with 
France  had  ended,  and  the  frontier  was  no  longer 
harassed  by  hostile  Indians.  The  towns  granted 
by  Massachusetts,  which  came  into  New  Hamp- 
shire by  the  determination  of  the  boundary,  were 
also  a  valuable  accession  ;  although  in  some  in- 
stances, as  at  Rumford  (now  Concord),  a  long  dis- 
pute took  place  between  the  Massachusetts  and 
the  New  Hampshire  grantees.  From  Wentworth's 
accession,  then,  the  noteworthy  prosperity  of  the 
Province  took  a  fresh  start,  and  the  way  was  pre- 
pared for  the  important  part  which  New  Hampshire 
played  in  the  Revolution  of  1775. 

The  Belcher  and  Waldron  interest  in  Massa- 
chusetts and  New  Hampshire  endeavored,  from 
1747  to  1750,  to  oust  Governor  Wentworth,  and 
they  coaxed  Colonel  Isaac  Royall  of  Medford,  a  rich 
West  India  merchant  who  had  retired  from  busi- 
ness, to  be  their  candidate,  and  to  put  out  a  thou- 
sand pounds  to  help  his  appointment.  After  this 
intrigue  had  gone  on  for  some  years,  it  was  quietly 
dropped,  and  both  provinces  came  to  regard  the 
separation  from  each  other  as  a  mutual  benefit. 
So  it  doubtless  was.  But  the  connection  had  also 
been  a  benefit  on  several  occasions.  It  had  de- 
fended the  adventurer  in  his  trade,  the  hunter  and 


174  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

coureur  des  hois  in  their  roving  life,  and  had  given 
to  education  and  religion  that  prominence  which 
they  rightfully  hold.  The  animosities  excited  hy 
Massachusetts  in  different  periods  have  reappeared 
at  intervals,  and  were  very  active  fi-om  1830  to 
1845,  while  Daniel  Webster  was  the  political  leader 
in  Massachusetts,  and  Isaac  Hill  in  New  Hamp- 
shire. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

THE   SWITZERLAND   OF   AMERICA 

The  triumph  of  Wentworth  over  Belcher,  and  of 
little  New  Hampshire  over  powerful  Massachusetts, 
brought  the  Province,  now  to  be  governed  by  the 
Wentworths  and  their  kindred  for  a  whole  genera- 
tion, into  broader  limits  than  it  could  long  main- 
tain. For  the  adoption  of  the  southern  boundary 
line,  running  due  west  until  it  should  meet  other 
grants  or  provinces  of  English  kings,  practically 
threw  all  Vermont,  for  a  quarter-century,  into 
New  Hampshire.  This  whole  territory,  as  enlarged 
by  the  later  Treaty  of  Paris,  contained  something 
more  than  18,300  square  miles,  of  which  a  little 
more  than  half  still  remain  to  New  Hampshire.  It 
included  the  highest  mountains  east  of  the  Rockies 
and  north  of  the  Carolinas,  —  the  White  Hills,  — 
and  also  the  Green  Mountains,  which  afterward 
gave  a  name  to  Vermont.  This  fact,  and  the  ad- 
venturous and  bold  character  of  the  people,  whether 
east  or  west  of  the  Connecticut  River,  presently 
won  for  the  Province  the  name  of  "  the  Switzer- 
land of  America."  It  was  an  ambitious  title,  not 
quite  justified  by  the  height  of  its  mountains  or 


176  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

the  extent  of  Its  territory ;  but  the  phrase  has  been 
long  in  use,  and  was  then  fairly  ajjpropriate.  The 
domain  itself,  from  1740  to  1764,  when  King 
George  gave  to  New  York  nominal  jurisdiction 
over  Vermont,  lay  between  latitude  42^  41'  and 
45°  11' ;  and  in  longitude,  measured  from  Green- 
wich, between  70°  40'  W.  and  73°  26'  W.  The 
number  of  acres  in  what  is  now  New  Hampshire  is 
a  little  short  of  6,000,000,  of  which  100,000  acres 
are  in  lakes,  and  as  much  more  occupied  with 
the  barren  summits  and  difficult  wooded  slopes 
of  numerous  mountains.  The  highest  of  these, 
Mt.  Washington,  is  6300  feet  above  the  sea-level, 
which  can  be  distinctly  seen,  near  Portland,  from 
its  top.  At  least  thirty  more  New  Hampshire 
mountains  are  above  3000  feet  high,  and  twenty 
exceed  4000  feet ;  higher,  that  is,  than  Cithseron, 
in  Attica.  From  this  extreme  height  to  the  lower 
range  in  Nottingham  and  Deerfield,  of  800  and 
1000  feet  above  the  near  sea,  many  mountains  are 
interspersed,  giving  rise  to  rivers  small  or  large, 
and  sometimes  to  goodly  lakes.  Fertile  valleys  and 
sloping  plains  lie  in  this  network  of  mountains ; 
and  these  slowly  attracted  the  men  ready  to  take 
service  in  subduing  the  wilderness  or  fighting  the 
hostile  savage. 

For  a  hundred  years  after  the  first  colonists 
sat  down  by  the  Pascataqua,  the  inland  regions 
could  not  be  occupied  safely,  by  reason  of  Indian 
hostilities  ;  nor  did  these  cease  until  long  after  the 


THE  SWITZERLAND  OF  AMERICA         177 

accession  of  Benning  Wentworth  as  Governor.  In- 
deed, one  of  his  first  memorable  acts  was  to  help 
his  neighbor  in  Kittery,  Colonel  Pepperrell,  fit  out 
the  expedition  which  in  1745  captured  Louisbourg, 
—  the  plan  for  this  surprising  attack  on  the  French 
fortress  having  been  formed  by  a  New  Hampshire 
merchant,  William  Vaughan,  grandson  of  the  mer- 
chant who  had  been  active  in  resisting  Cranfield 
and  Mason.  In  this  war  several  of  the  Governor's 
near  kinsmen  took  an  active  part :  one  of  whom, 
Theodore  Atkinson,  second  of  the  name  in  New 
Hampshire,  had  twenty  years  before  made  the  jour- 
ney to  Quebec  to  ransom  Indian  captives,  and  in- 
sist on  terms  of  peace  with  the  Indian  allies  of 
France.  About  that  time  (1719-23)  the  Province 
received  an  accession  from  northern  Ireland,  the 
so-called  Scotch-Irish,  some  of  whose  elders  had 
been  at  the  long  siege  of  Derry  by  James  II. 
They  proved  to  be  among  the  jnost.xesolute  plant- 
•ers  of  new  towns  in.  the  "  chestnut  country  "  and 
furtlier  north  and  west ;  introducing  Scotch  Pres- 
byterianism,  Scotch  clan-names,  and  the  Irish  po- 
tatoes among  the  descendants  of  EnoHsh  Puritans 
and  Cavaliers.  After  the  Jacobite  rebellions  of 
1715  and  1745,  refugees  from  Scotland  itself  came 
over  in  small  numbers ;  and  this  infusion  of  the 
Highland  and  Lowland  blood  tinged  perceptibly 
the  population  that  furnished  soldiers  for  the  war 
which  expelled  the  French  arms  from  Canada,  and 
at  last  relieved  New  Hampshire  from  all  dread  of 
Indian  raids  and  massacres. 


178  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

Taking  advantage  of  the  acquaintance  acquired, 
in  this  final  war,  with  lands  along  the  upper  Con- 
necticut and  toward  Lake  Champlain,  Governor 
Wentworth,  after  Wolfe  had  captured  Quebec, 
granted  numerous  town  charters  in  New  Hamp- 
shire and  Vermont ;  in  the  latter  district  not  less 
than  a  hundred  and  thirty  between  1760  and  1767. 
He  bad  previously  made  many  grants  nearer  to 
Portsmouth  and  Dover,  while  Massachusetts  had 
done  the  same  in  the  extensive  southwestern  sec- 
tion of  the  Province  which  she  claimed  as  lier  own. 
Occasionally  these  grants  conflicted,  as  the  early 
royal  grants  did  in  the  seaboard  settlements,  and 
it  was  necessary  to  call  on  the  Privy  Council  to 
settle  long  controversies  thence  arising.  The  most 
noteworthy  of  these  was  the  contest  between  the 
Wentworths  and  their  partisans,  under  the  title 
of  "  proprietors  of  Bow,"  and  the  actual  settlers 
of  what  is  now  Concord  (earlier  known  as  Rum- 
ford  and  Penacook),  headed  by  their  two  leaders, 
Timothy  Walker,  father-in-law  of  the  eminent  man 
of  science  known  to  the  world  as  Count  Rumford, 
and  his  first  son-in-law,  Benjamin  Rolfe.  This  con- 
test repeated  the  principles  and  secured  the  result 
which  had  shown  themselves  in  the  struggle  be- 
tween the  absentee  landlords  of  1650-90  and  their 
hard-working  tenants  on  the  tidewater.  It  also 
brought  out  in  a  glaring  instance  one  source  of  the 
large  wealth  and  extending  influence  of  the  Went- 
worths of  Portsmouth,  —  their  reservation  of  land 


THE   SWITZERLAND   OF   AMERICA         179 

to  themselves  and  their  friends  in  hundreds  of  town 
charters,  which  they  granted  between  1720  and 
1775.  In  a  peaceful  way  —  for  it  was  not  a  family 
of  soldiers,  either  in  England  or  New  Hampshire 
—  the  Wentworths  repeated  there  such  aggressions 
as  the  Hapsburg  governors  more  violently  practiced 
in  the  Forest  Cantons  of  Switzerland,  and  thus  led 
^o  the  independence  of  the  Swiss.  The  story  of 
those  far-off  and  legendary  days  cannot  be  read, 
especially  in  the  verse  of  Schiller's  "  William  Tell," 
without  recalling  to  a  son  of  the  Granite  State  the 
annals  of  his  own  ancestors. 

While  the  title  to  the  jurisdiction  of  the  lands 
about  the  Merrimac  was  still  undecided  by  the 
Crown,  Massachusetts  had  asserted  its  claim  prac- 
tically, and  gathered  money  into  its  exchequer,  by 
granting  townships  in  the  disputed  territory.  It 
was  not  from  her  General  Court  that  the  Scotch- 
Irish  from  Ulster  got  their  orig-inal  orant  of  Nut- 
field,  which  they  promptly  renamed  Derry  and 
Londonderry  ;  but  it  was  in  Massachusetts  (at 
Newburyport)  that  they  landed,  after  having  the 
same  experience  in  Casco  Bay  that  repelled  the 
colonists  of  the  Plough  Patent  nearly  a  century 
earlier.  It  was  there,  too,  that  Owen  O'Sullivan 
of  Ardea  in  Kerry,  father  of  two  governors,  John 
and  James  Sullivan  (one  of  New  Hampshire,  the 
other  of  Massachusetts),  landed,  under  the  name  of 
John  Sullivan,  at  the  age  of  thirty-one,  and  began 
to  "  diffuse  learning,"  as  his  obituary  said,  for  sixty 


180  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

years,  in  the   Pascataqua  region,  —  sometimes  on 
one  side  of  the  river,  and  sometimes  on  the  other. 

This  descendant  of  four  Irish  countesses  and  the 
ancient  kings  of  Kerry  had  abandoned  the  pater- 
nal castle  on  the  Kenmare  (for  what  cause  is  not 
known),  changed  his  name,  and  come  over  to  New- 
buryport  in  an  emigrant  vessel,  bound  to  service 
for  the  payment  of  his  passage,  which  he  was 
"  working  out "  with  a  Newbury  farmer  named 
Nowell.  According  to  family  tradition,  being 
"genteelly  bred  and  liberally  educated,  he  there 
wrote  a  letter,  expressed  in  several  different  lan- 
guages," to  Rev.  Samuel  Moody  (one  of  the  an- 
cestors of  Waldo  Emerson),  the  minister  of  York, 
asking  his  aid  towards  a  better  position.  The 
learned  minister  could  not  read  all  the  languages, 
for  one  of  them  was  Irish  Gaelic,  but  he  pro- 
cured the  polyglot  bondman  a  private  school  at 
Berwick.  Thence  he  radiated  to  different  towns 
in  the  course  of  his  life  of  a  hundred  and  three 
years,  and  in  1743  fled  to  Boston  to  escape  the 
scoldings  of  a  too  irritable  wife,  who  appealed  to 
him,  in  the  Boston  "Evening  Post"  of  July  25, 
1743,  to  return  to  New  Hampshire,  where  she  was 
then  living,  and  forgive  her.^    She  had  come  over, 

^  She  dated  her  epistle  at  Somersworth,  N.  H.,  July  11,  174.S, 
lamenting  "  your  abrupt  departure  and  forsaking  of  your  wife 
and  tender  babes,"  and  confessing  that  she  was  to  blame  "  by  my 
too  rash  and  unadvised  speech  and  behavior  towards  you."  She 
added,  "  Why  should  a  few  angry  and  unkind  words  from  an  an- 
gry and  fretful  wife,  for  which  I  am  now  paying  full  dear,  make 


THE   SWITZERLAND   OF   AMERICA         181 

like  himself,  as  a  bound  servant  (Margery  Brown 
by  name),  had  been  "  ransomed  "  by  Master  Sulli- 
van, and  when  she  was  twenty-one,  about  1735, 
had  married  him.  The  New  Hampshire  General 
and  the  Massachusetts  Governor  were  her  chil- 
dren, John  born  in  1740  at  Berwick,  and  James  in 
1744. 

But  this  is  a  digression.  The  grant  from  Massa- 
chusetts at  Penacoolv  was  not  made  to  the  new 
Scotch  immigrants  at  Londonderry,  —  "  Irish,"  as 
they  were  called  by  their  Puritan  neighbors,  much 

you  thus  to  forsake  me  and  your  children  ?  "  Master  Sullivan  re- 
turned, and  at  the  age  of  ninety  used  to  mount  his  horse  and  ride 
from  Berwick  to  Durham,  where  his  son,  the  General,  was  living 
as  judge  or  Governor  ;  returning  home  the  same  day,  a  journey 
of  thirty  miles.  At  ninety-three,  he  wrote  to  General  Sullivan, 
regretting  his  great  age,  telling  the  story  of  his  Irish  kinsmen, 
and  saying,  "  They  were  all  a  short-lived  family  ;  they  either  died 
in  the  bloom  or  went  out  of  the  nation  ;  but  the  brevity  of  their 
lives,  to  my  great  grief  and  sorrow,  is  added  to  the  length  of 
mine."  He  closed  his  letter  with  a  Latin  quatrain  in  elegiacs, 
which  reads  thus  in  English  :  — 

"  Was  Adam  all  men's  sire,  and  Eve  their  mother  ? 
Then  how  can  one  be  nobler  than  another  ? 
Ennobled  are  we  not,  by  sire  or  dame, 
Till  life  and  conduct  give  us  noble  fame." 

This  sturdy  Irish  veteran,  bred  a  Catholic,  but  living  a  New  Eng- 
land Protestant  until  1795,  has  been  introduced  as  a  romantic 
character  (which  he  surely  was)  into  Miss  Jewett's  admirable 
romance  of  The  Tory  Lover.  He  was  evidently  one  of  those 
Kerry  youths  whom  Lord  Herbert  of  Cherbury  mentioned  in  his 
report  of  1673  as  "  learning  of  needless  Latin  instead  of  useful 
trades,"  —  the  class  subsisting  into  the  reign  of  Queen  Anne, 
when  Owen  O'Sullivan  was  learning  the  Latin  and  Greek  which 
he  taught  along  the  Pascataqua. 


182  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

to  their  dislike,  —  but  to  the  survivors  of  a  memo- 
rable Indian  campaign  in  1723-24.  The  war  of 
those  years  had  been  stimulated  by  French  priests 
in  Maine  and  Canada,  the  attacking  parties  coming 
down  to  the  Pascataqua  towns  by  way  of  Lake 
Winipiseogee,  distant  in  its  nearest  bay  only  thirty 
miles  from  Cocheco  Falls  in  Dover.  In  the  sum- 
mer of  1723  they  began  their  raids  at  Dover,  and 
soon  were  murdering  and  capturing  women  and 
children  at  Newmarket  and  Durham.^  In  the 
spring  of    1724  they  extended  their  raids  to  the 

^  It  should  be  mentioned,  as  an  example  of  what  particular 
families  suffered  by  these  attacks,  that  Mrs.  Rawlins  of  New- 
market, whose  husband  and  daughter  were  killed  in  this  raid,  was 
a  daughter  of  Edward  Taylor,  who  was  killed  by  Indians  at  the 
same  place  in  1704  ;  and  that  Tristram  Heard,  slain  in  Dover, 
was  the  son  of  that  Mrs.  Heard  whose  life  was  saved  in  1089  by 
a  grateful  savage.  The  Dover  Quakers  were  as  little  spared  by 
the  Indians  and  Jesuits  as  were  tlie  Puritans  ;  one  of  them,  John 
Hanson,  had  two  of  his  children  killed  and  scalped  while  he  was 
at  the  Weekly  Friends'  Meeting.  His  wife  and  four  other  chil- 
dren, one  an  infant  of  two  weeks,  were  carried  to  Canada  and  sold 
to  the  French.  Mrs.  Hanson,  says  Belknap,  "  had  a  firm  and  vig- 
orous mind,  and  passed  througii  her  hardships  with  much  resolu- 
tion and  patience.  When  her  milk  failed,  she  supported  her  infant 
with  water,  which  she  warmed  in  her  mouth  and  dropped  on  her 
breast ;  till  the  squaws,  pitying  her,  taught  her  to  beat  the  ker- 
nels of  walnuts  and  boil  it  with  bruised  corn,  which  proved  a 
nourishing  food  for  her  babe."  She  was  redeemed  by  her  hus- 
band in  1725,  with  three  of  her  children  ;  but  the  eldest  daugh- 
ter was  retained,  converted,  and  married  to  a  French  Catholic. 
Yillieu,  a  French  officer,  describing  his  raid  of  1694,  gives  the 
plan  adopted  in  many  of  these  affairs.  "  They  divide  into  bands 
of  four  or  five,  and  knock  people  in  the  head  by  surprise,  which 
must  have  a  good  effect,''^ 


THE   SWITZERLAND   OF   AMERICA         183 

new  town  of  Kingston,  which  had  been  broken  up 
by  Indian  attacks  in  a  former  war,  and  took  away 
Peter  Colcord  and  three  Stevenses  to  Canada.  In 
Durham,  the  following  June,  after  an  encounter  in 
which  two  townsmen  and  one  Indian  were  killed, 
the  assailants  withdrew,  leaving  their  leader,  of  the 
Castine  family  (with  his  fine  fur  coronet  and  bells, 
whose  sound  his  men  were  to  follow,  his  prayer- 
book  and  muster-roll  of  one  hundred  and  eighty 
warriors),  to  be  scalped  and  conjectured  by  the 
provincials.  They  thought  him  a  son  of  Father 
Rasles  by  his  Indian  laundress  ;  but  he  seems  rather 
to  have  been  a  son  or  grandson  of  the  Baron  de 
Saint-Castin  by  his  Indian  wife.  Acting  under  the 
impression  that  the  savages  were  Father  Rasles' 
Christians  from  Norridgewock,  two  Maine  captains, 
with  two  hundred  men,  in  August,  1724,  pushed 
through  the  woods  to  Norridgewock,  killed  Rasles 
and  fifty  or  sixty  of  his  church  militant,  burned 
his  church  and  their  huts,  and  brought  away  the 
church  ornaments  as  trophies. 

The  Puritan  settlements  were  extending  north- 
ward from  Dunstable,  and  in  the  same  year  Thomas 
Blanchard  and  another  were  captured  in  Nashua, 
and  carried  to  Canada ;  their  friends,  following 
up  the  savages,  were  ambushed  and  killed.  This 
incited  John  Lovewell,  a  brave  man  of  the  Massa- 
chusetts Dunstable,  to  raise  a  band  and  make  a 
winter  campaign  against  the  Indians,  of  whom  he 
surprised  and  slew  ten,  in  February,  1725,  as  they 


184  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

were  coming  clown  from  Canada  with  new  guns, 
blankets,  and  snowslioes,  for  the  better  removal  of 
captives  whom  they  hoped  to  take  and  sell.  Three 
weeks  later,  Lovewell,  with  a  party  of  fortj'-six,  set 
forth  again,  built  a  fort  at  Ossipee,  and  pushed  on 
to  Fryeburg  in  May,  where  the  Pequaket  Indians 
had  a  village.  On  the  shore  of  a  great  pond  they 
espied  and  shot  an  Indian,  and  were  themselves 
discoviered  and  counted  by  a  band  of  Indians  larger 
than  their  own.  Falling  into  their  ambush.  Love- 
well  and  a  third  of  his  small  force  were  killed  or 
wounded  ;  the  rest  made  good  tlieir  retreat  of  sixty 
miles,  with  less  than  half  the  original  force.  In 
recompense,  they  and  their  friends  were  granted 
shares  in  the  Penacook  townships,  one  of  which, 
Suncook,  was  granted  outright  to  the  survivors  of 
Lovewell's  band  and  the  heirs  of  the  slain.  The 
upper  Penacook  grant  had  been  made  a  little  earlier, 
by  Massachusetts,  to  Benjamin  Stevens  and  others, 
who  were  jealous  of  the  New  Hampshire  authori- 
ties, and  afraid  the  Ulster  men  might  forestall  them. 
Massachusetts  had  five  years  before  warned  the 
Scotch-Irish  away  from  Londonderry,  because  they 
had  "  i^resumed  to  make  a  settlement  upon  lands 
belonging  to  this  Province,  which  they  call  Nut- 
field,  without  any  leave  or  grant  obtained  from  the 
General  Court."  And  now  the  Penacook  petition- 
ers to  Massachusetts  declared,  — 

"  That  many  applications  have  been  made  to  the 
government  of  New  Hampshire  for  a  grant  of  the 


THE   SWITZERLAND   OF   AMERICA         185 

said  land  ;  which,  though  it  he  the  undoubted  right 
and  property  of  this  Province,  yet  it  is  highly 
probable  that  a  parcel  of  Irish  people  will  obtain  a 
grant  from  New  Hampshire  for  it,  unless  some 
speedy  care  be  taken  to  prevent  it." 

Such  care  was  taken,  and  the  Massachusetts 
grant  made ;  but  as  the  Tyngs,  Wainwrights,  etc., 
from  Boston,  were  making  their  survey  for  the 
grantees,  in  May,  1726,  their  recorder,  John  Wain- 
wright,  noted  in  his  diary  of  May  1-i  :  — 

"  This  day  about  noon,  Messrs.  Nathaniel  Weare, 
Richard  Waldron,  Jr.  and  Theodore  Atkinson,  a  com- 
mittee from  the  Governor  and  Council  of  New  Hamp- 
shire, came  up  to  our  camp,  (being  attended  with  about 
a  half-score  of  Irishmen,  who  kept  at  some  distance  from 
the  camp)  and  acquainted  us  that  the  government  of 
New  Hampshire  had  sent  them  to  desire  us  that  we  would 
not  proceed  in  appropriating  these  lands  to  any  particu- 
lar or  private  persons  ;  for  that  they  lay  in  their  govern- 
ment, and  our  government's  making  a  grant  might  be 
attended  with  very  ill  consequences  to  the  settlers,  when 
it  appeared  that  the  lands  fell  in  the  New  Hampshire 
government." 

Wainwright  and  his  comrades  sent  back  a  civil 
answer  to  the  lieutenant-governor  of  the  Province 
(John  Wentworth),  but  went  on  with  their  survey  ; 
and  presently  noted  that  "  divers  rattlesnakes  were 
killed  by  the  surveying  companies ;  but,  thanks  be 
to  God,  nobody  received  any  hurt  from  them."  Rat- 
tlesnakes or  Scotch-Irish  to  the  contrary  notwith- 


186  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

standing,  the  Puritans  were  bent  on  carrying  out 
the  order  of  the  Great  and  General  Court,  and  did 
so.  Their  grantees  occui)ied  Penacook  in  1727-28, 
and  had  so  much  increased  in  number  by  October, 
1730,  that  they  settled  a  minister.  Rev.  Timothy 
Walker,  a  recent  graduate  of  Harvard,  and  ordained 
him,  where  he  was  to  remain  for  fifty -two  years,  the 
leading  citizen  of  the  town,  which  presently  took 
the  name  of  Rumford.  In  the  ordination  sermon, 
Mr.  Barnard  of  Andover  directed  attention  to  the 
history  of  the  place  as  having  been  long  the  home 
of  a  hostile  Indian  tribe,  saying :  "  Your  settlement 
is  in  a  place  where  Satan  some  years  ago  had  his 
seat,  and  the  Devil  was  wont  to  be  invocated  by 
forsaken  Salvages ;  a  place  which  was  the  rendez- 
vous and  headquarters  of  our  Indian  enemies."  It 
was  within  the  limits  of  Rumford,  on  an  island  in 
the  Contoocook  River,  that  Mrs.  Hannah  Dustan, 
daughter  of  Michael  Emerson  of  Haverhill,  had  in 
1690  freed  herself  and  her  children  from  Indian 
captivity  by  killing  her  captors  as  they  lay  asleep. 
The  town  thus  became  a  new  frontier,  and  was  so 
described  in  the  appeal  to  the  king  which  Colonel 
Rolfe  and  his  father-in-law.  Parson  Walker,  sent  to 
England  in  1753,  when  the  New  Hampshire  courts, 
influenced  by  the  Portsmouth  gentry  and  the  hos- 
tility of  the  people  to  Massachusetts,  had  repeat- 
edly decided  against  the  Rumford  colonists,  and 
sought  to  invalidate  their  land  grants  and  pur- 
chases.   Appealing  first  to  Governor  Wentworth, 


THE   SWITZERLAND   OF   AMERICA         187 

in  1744,  Rolfe  said  his  people  were  settled  "  on  the 
main  gangways  of  the  Canadians  to  this  Province," 
and  that  to  dispossess  them  "  will  greatly  disserve 
His  Majesty's  interest,  by  encouraging  his  enemies 
to  encroach  on  his  derelict  dominions ;  and  be  all- 
hurtful  to  the  Province,  by  contracting  its  borders, 
and  by  drawing  the  war  nearer  to  the  capital," 
which  was  Portsmouth,  then  reasonably  safe.  This 
was  illustrated  in  1746,  when  the  Indians,  under 
French  instigation,  attacked  the  settlement  more 
than  once. 

When  Weare,  Waldron,  and  Atkinson  went 
back  to  Portsmouth  in  1726,  they  reported  to  John 
Wentworth  the  contumacy  of  Massachusetts  offi- 
cials. Thereupon  Wentworth  was  angry,  and  in  the 
next  year,  1727,  in  a  speech  which  he  afterward 
withdrew,  he  recommended  the  Assembly,  — 

"  That  you  will  consider  some  expedient  to  prevent  the 
disorderly  people  of  the  other  Province  from  coming-  into 
this,  and  pretending  to  lay  out  plats  of  townships  in  His 
Majesty's  Province,  ah*eady  chartered  by  this  govern- 
ment to  His  Majesty's  good  subject.  Which  may  tend 
to  overthrow  the  good  order,  and  be  destructive  to  our 
peace,  if  not  speedily  prevented  by  good  wholesome  laws 
made  for  that  end." 

One  means  taken  by  the  Wentworths  was  to 
grant  the  town  of  Bow,  in  May,  1727,  to  the  Gov- 
ernor and  Council  of  New  Hampshire,  and  their 
associates,  a  hundred  in  number,  and  to  include  in 
its  territory  the  greater  part  of  Rumford  and  Sun- 


188  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

cook  (now  Concord  and  Pembroke),  as  well  as  the 
present  town  of  Bow.  This  was  to  offset  the  Mas- 
sachusetts grant  of  two  years  earlier,  and,  had  it 
been  followed  up  by  actual  settlement  under  the 
grant,  would  have  given  the  Massachusetts  planters 
much  trouble.  But  no  settlement  was  made  by  the 
New  Hampshire  grantees,  while  the  Rumford  men 
went  forward  and  complied  with  all  the  conditions 
of  their  grant,  long  before  the  order  of  the  king  in 
council  fixed  the  boundary  line  so  as  to  bring  Rum- 
ford  into  New  Hampshire.  A  year  after  this  order 
(1742),  New  Hampshire  established  the  towns 
granted  by  Massachusetts  as  districts,  of  which 
Rumford  was  one  ;  with  liberty  to  tax  for  the  sup- 
port of  church,  schools,  etc.,  but  without  represen- 
tation in  the  legislature.  This  temporary  measure 
was  continued  until  1749,  when  Rumford  was  dis- 
franchised by  failure  to  renew  the  District  Act,  and 
suits  were  begun  against  the  individual  owners 
thei-e,  by  writs  of  ejectment.  The  first  was  entered 
in  the  lower  court,  December,  1749,  and  the  value 
at  issue  was  too  small  to  allow  an  appeal  to  the 
king.  Consequently,  the  courts  being  in  the  hands 
of  the  Governor,  sheriff,  etc.,  who  were  interested 
in  the  Bow  charter,  verdicts  were  steadily  given 
against  the  Rumford  settlers,  and  no  apjieal  al- 
lowed, although  the  king  in  his  order  of  1741  had 
expressly  sj^ecified  that  rights  of  property  should 
not  be  lost  or  damaged  by  the  change  of  bounda- 
ries.   The  case  was  flagrant,  and  even  worse  in 


THE   SWITZERLAND   OF   AMERICA         189 

some  respects  than  tliat  of  Mason  and  the  first  set- 
tlers ;  for  they  coukl  appeal,  although  the  royal 
council  was  prejudiced  against  them. 

The  result  was  a  triumph  for  the  settlers,  as  be- 
fore, and  a  fine  vindication  of  the  justice  of  English 
law  when  political  considerations  do  not  bias  opin- 
ion and  pervert  equity.  The  Rumford  "  Proprie- 
tors "  (an  organization  provided  for  most  of  the 
new  towns)  were  still  in  legal  existence.  They 
met  and  voted  that  they  would  maintain  the  rights 
of  their  members  at  the  expense  of  the  whole  body, 
and  proceeded  to  sell  some  of  their  common  land 
to  meet  the  cost  of  suits,  and  of  an  appeal  to  Eng- 
land. When  case  after  case  went  against  them  in 
the  local  courts,  and  the  Governor  and  Council 
neglected  to  do  justice,  —  being  parties  in  interest, 
and  unwilling  to  decide  against  themselves,  —  the 
Proprietors  sent  Parson  Walker  to  plead  the  cause 
in  London,  by  an  appeal  to  the  king  as  petitioners. 
Colonel  Rolfe  stayed  at  home  to  look  after  the  in- 
habitants, and  Rev.  Timothy  Walker  set  forth  for 
England  in  the  autumn  of  1753.  He  retained  as 
counsel  the  famous  Murray,  better  known  as  Lord 
Mansfield,  —  a  bitter  Tory,  but  a  just  man,  apt 
and  profound  in  legal  lore.  He  procured  a  hear- 
ing before  the  Privy  Council  in  October,  1754,  and 
in  June,  1755,  it  was  ordered  by  the  king  in  council, 

"  That  a  judgment  of  the  Superior  Court  of  the  Pro- 
vince of  New  Hampshire,  recovered  by  the  proprietors 
of  Bow  against  the  said  John  Merrill,  on  the  first  Tues- 


190  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

day  of  August,  1753,  should  be  reversed ;  and  that  the 
appellant  be  restored  to  what  he  may  have  lost  by  means 
of  said  judgment.  Whereof  the  Governor  and  Com- 
mander-in-Chief of  His  Majesty's  Province  of  Kew 
Hampshire  for  the  time  being,  and  all  others  whom  it 
may  concern,  are  to  take  notice  and  govern  themselves 
accordingly."  ^ 

This  ought  to  have  fiuished  the  matter ;  but  did 
not.  The  Wentworths  brought  another  suit,  this 
time  for  a  larger  sum,  so  as  to  allow  an  appeal  to 
London,  and  made  Colonel  Rolfe  one  of  the  de- 
fendants. Once  more  the  courts  decided  against 
justice,  and  again  Parson  Walker  went  to  London 
to  present  his  appeal.  Lord  Mansfield,  being  then 
on  the  bench,  could  only  take  part  as  a  friend ;  but 
Mr.  Walker  quotes  him  as  laying  down  the  law, 
with  his  usual  clearness  :  — 

^  See  J.  B.  Walker's  "  Bow  Controversy"  printed  in  the  Proceed- 
ings of  the  New  Hampshire  Historical  Socvty  (Concord,  1902),  pp. 
261-292.  In  support  of  the  cause  of  their  Rumford  grantees,  the 
Massachusetts  General  Court  voted  £100  sterling  in  1753,  and  in- 
structed an  agent,  Mr.  BoUan,  to  aid  them  in  London.  This  action, 
had  it  been  remembered  at  the  time,  would  have  served  as  a  pre- 
cedent for  Massachusetts  to  vote  an  appropriation  in  aid  of  her 
former  citizens  in  Kansas,  in  1S57,  as  petitioned  for  in  the  session 
of  that  year,  and  advocated  by  John  Brown,  the  hero  of  Kansas 
and  Virginia,  who  appeared  before  a  committee  of  the  General 
Court  for  that  purpose,  introduced  by  the  present  writer,  then 
Secretary  of  the  Massachusetts  State  Kansas  Conmiittee.  Two 
States  did  make  such  appropriations,  —  Vermont  by  its  legisla- 
ture, and  Iowa  through  its  governor  and  adjutant-general,  who 
sent  in  some  of  the  state  muskets  to  defend  the  Free  State  set- 
tlers. 


THE  SWITZERLAND  OF  AMERICA         191 

"  Whoever  settled  under  a  grant  from  either  side, 
if  he  happened  to  be  on  the  wrong  side  of  the  Hne,  as 
he  was  preckided  from  defending  himself  by  his  grant, 
his  possession  should  he  his  title  ;  and  possession  with  a 
grant  from  Massachusetts  was  as  good  as  with  a  grant 
from  New  Hampshire.  It  appeared  that  Bow  had  chosen 
committees  to  waive  people  from  trespassing  [with  a 
sneer],  but  Massachusetts  people  were  strong,  and  went 
on  and  settled,  while  Bow  only  claimed.  The  order  of 
the  King  in  Council  was  the  great  point ;  the  words 
there  were,  not  private  possession,  but  private  jyt'operti/. 
What  a  man  claimed  under  a  certain  title,  part  whereof 
he  actually  improved,  was  his  private  property." 

The  king  in  council  heard  the  report,  which 
was  in  accordance  with  Mansfield's  summing  up, 
and  stigmatized  the  Wentwortlis  and  their  associ- 
ates as  "  certain  persons  in  New  Hampshire,  desir- 
ous to  make  the  labors  of  others  an  advantage 
to  themselves  ; "  and  on  the  29th  of  December, 
1762,  reaffirmed  the  order  of  1755,  reversing  the 
decisions  in  Portsmouth,  and  directing  "that  the 
appellants  be  restored  to  what  they  may  have  lost 
by  reason  of  said  judgments." 

The  principle  declared  by  Mansfield  is  the  same 
in  essence  as  that  affirmed  by  Halifax  in  censur- 
ing Cranfield,  and  by  the  council  of  James  II  in 
restoring  his  forfeited  estate  to  Edward  Gove  in 
1685.  It  is  this,  —  that  a  natural  right  lies  at  the 
foundation  of  legal  right,  and  will  be  maintained 
against  technical  fictions  and  interested  verdicts. 


192  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

It  is  the  good  fortune  and  should  be  the  pride  of 
New  Hampshire  that,  when  her  people  were  few 
and  poor,  they  found  citizens  stout  enough  to  stand 
up  for  natural  right,  and  maintain  the  contest 
until  the  slow  and  heavy  artillery  of  the  law  came 
up  to  give  them  the  victory. 

It  will  be  seen  by  these  transactions  that  the 
Province  was  like  Switzei'land  of  the  eighteenth 
century  in  this  respect,  —  that  it  was  an  oligarchy, 
where  powerful  persons,  imitating  in  their  small 
acre  the  aggressive  nobles  of  Berne,  had  their  own 
way  for  a  while,  until  the  democratic  spirit,  which 
Calvinism  fosters,  brought  about  more  equality 
and  freedom.  Everything  in  New  Hampshire  be- 
fore 1740  was  small,  —  tlie  territory,  the  opportuni- 
ties, the  riches,  the  ambitions,  —  everything  but  the 
foundation  ideas  upon  which  their  commonwealth 
was  based.  After  that  date  the  landscape  broadens. 
In  1730,  according  to  a  report  made  to  the  home 
government  in  that  year,  the  whole  population  was 
but  10,200,  of  whom  200  were  "  blacks  ;  "  but  the 
increase  in  ten  years  had  been  4000,  or  more  than 
65  per  cent.,  and  of  these  "  1000  at  least  are  people 
from  Ireland,  lately  come  into  and  settled  within 
the  Province."  A  reason  for  the  other  increase  was 
"  a  peace  with  the  Indians  the  last  four  years  ; 
there  are  now  in  time  of  peace  no  Indians  within 
the  Province."  The  shipping  is  rated  at  only  500 
tons  belonging  to  the  Province  ;  other  vessels 
annually  trading  there,  at  400  tons  ;  the  number 


THE  SWITZERLAND  OF  AMERICA         193 

of  seafaring  men  only  40.  The  exports  to  Europe 
and  the  West  Indies  were  j£1000  sterling  in  a 
year,  but  by  the  coasting  trade  to  Boston  X5000  ; 
and  all  sorts  of  British  manufactures  came  in,  up 
to  X5000  sterling  a  year.  The  militia  were  1800, 
in  two  regiments.  At  this  date  the  inhabitants  of 
Rumford  were  probably  300 ;  in  1767  they  had  in- 
creased to  752,  and  in  1775  to  1052,  —  more  than 
trebling  in  forty-five  years.  The  rest  of  the  Pro- 
vince increased  even  faster,  and  wealth  in  the  chief 
towns  grew  rapidly.  The  expedition  which  cap- 
tured Louisbom-g  in  1745  was  carried  through  by 
the  enthusiasm  of  William  Vaughan,  and  the  abil- 
ity and  discretion  of  Governor  Shirley  of  Massa- 
chusetts, seconded,  as  both  were,  by  the  energies  of 
the  Wentworths,  and  the  popularity  of  their  neigh- 
boi7"C6lonel  Pepperrell.  The  soldiers  sent  by  New 
Hampshire  were  500,  or  an  eighth  part  of  the  force 
contributed  by  the  three  colonies  of  Massachusetts, 
Connecticut,  and  New  Hampshire.  Much  of  the 
glory  went  to  Vaughan,  who,  with  only  thirteen 
men,  took  and  held  the  great  battery  on  the  shore  ; 
and  the  New  Hampshire  troops  did  much  of  the 
heavy  work  of  putting  the  siege  artillery  in  posi- 
tion. They  were  still  more  conspicuous  in  the  next 
war  with  France,  where  John  Stark  first  distin- 
guished himself. 

In  the  mean  time.  Governor  Wentworth,  while 
enriching  himself  by  the  reservations  made  in  his 
town  grants,  was  losing  his  hold  on  his  offices.    He 


194  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

had  a  standing  quarrel  with  the  Assembly  for  years, 
which  lost  him  some  of  his  friends  in  England, 
although  he  was  sustained  in  his  specific  acts  of 
disallowing  his  enemy,  Waldron,  as  Speaker,  and 
summoning  several  new  towns  to  send  representa- 
tives. The  king  looked  on  such  acts  as  part  of 
his  own  prerogative,  which  might  well  be  assumed 
by  his  viceroy.  But  New  Plampshire  lost  ground  in 
England  on  Wentworth's  account,  and  at  several 
distinct  intervals  efforts  were  made  to  remove  him. 
He  quarreled  often  with  the  Assembly,  negatived 
their  choice  of  Speaker  (which  they  claimed  as  an 
act  of  usurpation,  though  the  king  upheld  it  with- 
out exercising  his  own  prerogative  in  that  way), 
and  in  various  affairs  Wentworth  displayed  the 
imperious  temper  which  he  certainly  had,  and  in 
which  his  nephew,  who  succeeded  him  as  Governor, 
was  wholly  lacking.  Yet  Benning  Wentworth  was 
in  many  respects  a  good  chief  magistrate ;  too  in- 
tent on  increasing  his  riches,  and  not  very  scrupu- 
lous in  the  manner  of  meeting  his  opponents  ;  but 
courageous,  active,  until  age  or  gout  disabled  him, 
and  with  all  the  shrewdness  of  a  successful  mer- 
chant, and  all  the  ambition  of  a  rising  man.  His 
hope  was  to  plant  a  family,  supported  by  a  great 
landed  estate  ;  and  in  this  he  was  by  no  means  sin- 
gular among  New  England  men.  His  first  children 
dying,  he  married  late  in  life,  under  circumstances 
which  brought  some  discredit  on  him  ;  the  second 
Mrs.  Wentworth  being  some  forty  years  younger 


THE  SWITZERLAND   OF   AMERICA         195 

than  himself,  and  a  servant  in  his  house  before  the 
marriage,  which  was  suddenly  resolved  on,  and 
imposed  by  his  magisterial  authority  on  the  Angli- 
can clergyman  who  performed  the  ceremony  (Rev. 
Arthur  Browne),  in  1759.  One  of  his  council,  James 
Nevin,  being  in  London  soon  after  the  accession  of 
George  III,  was  questioned  closely  as  to  this  mar- 
riage, and  wrote  to  Secretary  Atkinson  (November 
14, 1761),  "111  will  had  carried  a  report  to  the  offi- 
cers that  the  Governor  had  married  a  dirty  slut  of 
a  maid.  I  was  asked  about  it  by  people  of  figure. 
I  told  it  as  I  think  it  really  was,  and  the  Governor 
was  approved  of."  The  name  of  the  bride  was 
Martha  Hilton,  a  descendant  of  the  Hilton  family 
who  first  settled  on  the  Pascataqua,  and  of  as  good 
an  origin,  except  in  wealth,  as  the  Went  worths. 
She  had  the  gift  of  beauty,  was  a  graceful  and  fa- 
vorite person,  in  both  her  marriages,  and  her  daugh- 
ter Martha  married  her  distant  cousin,  a  nephew 
of  Sir  John  Wentworth.^ 

1  Martha  Hilton  is  the  heroine  of  Lon^ellow's  poem  Lady 
Wentworth,  but  she  never  properly  had  that  title.  Her  second 
husband  was  an  English  Michael  Wentworth  from  Yorkshire,  and 
in  1781)  she  entertained  President  Washington  at  her  house  in 
Little  Harbor,  which  the  Governor  bequeathed  her,  with  most  of 
his  other  property,  in  1770.  He  was  bom  in  Portsmouth  in  1695, 
and  was  two  years  older  than  his  brother-in-law,  Atkinson,  who 
had  equal  or  superior  abilities,  a  better  education,  and  was  a  firm 
supporter  of  the  Wentworth  riile,  by  which  he  profited  in  estate 
and  reputation.  The  late  marriage  of  Benning'  Wentworth,  and 
his  bequest  of  property,  led  to  family  jars,  by  which  for  a  time 
the  reputation  of  his  wife  suffered. 


196  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

The  war  between  England  and  France  (which 
first  began  in  the  Colonies,  in  1754)  found  New 
Hampshire  much  exposed  to  attack  from  Canada, 
as  in  former  wars ;  and  Indian  atrocities  were  re- 
newed after  a  short  interval  of  quiet,  during  which 
the  colonists  had  pushed  farther  into  the  forest  on 
both  sides  of  the  Province.  Along  the  Connecticut 
and  its  tributaries  towns  had  been  granted  both 
by  Massachusetts  and  New  Hampshire,  and  these 
now  felt  the  savage  assault.  The  tributaries  of  the 
Merrimac  also  had  their  upper  settlements  raided, 
about  the  time  Washington  was  defending  his  fort 
in  the  Ohio  region.  A  whole  family  in  1754  were 
carried  captive  from  Salisbury,  the  native  town 
of  Daniel  Webster,  sold  in  Canada,  afterward 
shipped  for  France,  but  captured  at  sea  by  an 
English  vessel,  and  put  ashore  at  Portland,  —  re- 
turning to  Salisbury  in  1758.  In  Walpole,  Colonel 
Bellows,  one  of  the  first  settlers,  at  the  head  of 
twenty  men,  broke  his  way  through  a  party  of  fifty 
Indians,  and  gained  the  shelter  of  his  garrison. 
Not  far  off,  John  Kilburn,  in  June,  1755,  withstood 
a  siege  of  two  hundred  Indians  in  his  own  garrison, 
with  a  force  of  three  men  and  two  women,  and  beat 
them  off.  He  was  the  first  settler  in  Walpole  (in 
1749),  and  lived  to  see  the  United  States  independ- 
ent and  Washington  President,  —  dying  in  1789  at 
the  age  of  eighty-five.  In  Hinsdale  (Fort  Dummer 
in  former  wars),  the  Indians  killed  and  captured 
twenty  persons,  among  them  Mrs.  Howe,  the  "  fair 


THE   SWITZERLAND   OF   AMERICA         197 

captive  "  of  the  poetic  David  Humphreys  in  his 
life  of  General  Putnam,  Another  of  the  Hinsdale 
captives,  Eunice  Gafheld,  being  sold  in  Canada, 
was  sent  to  France,  thence  escaped  to  England, 
returned  to  Boston,  and  lived  in  Massachusetts  till 
1830,  when  she  died  at  ninety-seven.  Such  was  the 
romance  and  tragedy  of  the  New  Hampshire  fron- 
tier towns  for  a  hundred  years ;  and  the  campaigns 
of  this  war  were  no  less  tragical  and  glorious  for 
the  yeomen  of  the  Province,  fighting  or  massa- 
cred after  surrender,  under  the  lead  of  Rogers  and 
Stark,  Messerve,  Goffe,  and  many  a  brave  captain, 
—  among  them  a  son  of  the  Lovewell  slain  at 
Fryeburg. 

At  the  capital  the  gentry  of  the  Province  — 
Wentworths,  Waldrons,  Weares,  Gilmans,  Atkin- 
sons, Sherburnes,  and  the  rest  —  did  their  part 
well,  raising  regiments  and  providing  funds  for  the 
harassing  and  often  alarming  warfare.  After  de- 
feats under  the  incapable  Loudoun  and  Webb  and 
the  incautious  Abercromby,  which  seemed  to  open 
New  Hampshire  to  French  invasion,  their  spirit 
rose  with  the  clanger.  The  old  Governor,  address- 
ing the  Assembly  in  September,  1756,  closed  by 
saying,  — 

"  Argument  or  persuasions  to  lead  you  into  so  inter- 
esting a  branch  of  duty  and  service,  I  look  upon  to 
be  needless ;  because  the  hour  seems  to  be  approaching 
when  the  inhabitants  of  this  Continent  must  universally 
unite  in  putting  a  stop  to  the  French  king's  army.    In 


198  NEW   HAMPSHIKE 

failure  of  which,  we  shall  soon  become  Provinces  and 
subjects  of  the  French  king ;  subjected  to  a  government 
whose  civil  polity  is  tyranny,  and  to  a  religion  teaching 
superstition  and  the  worship  of  wood  and  stone,  instead 
of  that  pure  and  uncorrupted  adoration  due  only  to  the 
Supreme  Being." 

It  was  at  this  crisis  that  the  genius  of  Pitt 
brought  hiui  to  the  front,  and  the  force  of  one  im- 
perious and  intrepid  man  put  a  new  face  on  the 
hazardous  situation  in  Europe  and  America.  "  No 
man,"  said  Colonel  Barre,  "  ever  entered  Mr.  Pitt's 
closet  who  did  not  come  out  of  it  a  braver  man." 
His  inspiration  was  soon  felt  in  the  Colonies,  and 
evoked  a  kindred  courage  in  the  people  whom  he 
honored  with  his  confidence.  The  formal  and  iter- 
ated language  of  his  letters  to  Wentworth  can- 
not disguise  the  greatness  of  soul  which  gleams 
through  it :  — 

"  His  Majesty  considering  that  the  several  Provinces, 
in  proximity  and  accessibility  of  situation  more  immedi- 
ately obnoxious  to  the  main  irruptions  of  the  enemy 
from  Canada,  are  of  themselves  well  able  to  furnish  at 
least  20,000  men  ;  I  am  commanded  to  signify  to  you 
the  king's  pleasure  that  you  do  forthwith  use  your 
utmost  endeavors  to  raise  with  all  possible  despatch, 
as  large  a  body  of  men  within  your  Government  as  the 
number  of  its  inhabitants  may  allow.  It  is  unnecessary 
to  add  anything  to  animate  your  zeal  in  the  execution 
of  His  Majesty's  orders  on  this  great  occasion;  where 
the  safety  and  preservation  of  America,   and  of  your 


THE   SWITZERLAND   OF   AMERICA         199 

own  Province  in  particular,  are  at  stake.  And  the  king 
doubts  not,  from  your  known  fidelity  and  attachment, 
that  you  will  employ  yourself  with  the  utmost  despatch 
in  this  urgent  and  dangerous  crisis." 

New  Hampshire  responded  nobly  to  Pitt's  ap- 
peal, and  her  small  army  of  soldiers,  every  man  a 
marksman,  and  more  than  half  of  them  bred  to 
a  toilsome  woodland  life,  were  at  the  front  in  every 
encounter,  except  in  those  retreats  where  the  post 
of  danger  was  at  the  rear.  It  was  service  of  this 
kind  which  made  them  so  efficient  in  the  battles  of 
the  Revolution ;  and  more  than  one  of  their  lead- 
ers won  a  great  name  in  that  conflict,  John  Stark 
in  particular. 

The  debt  arising  from  this  war  was  less  burden- 
some than  formerly,  because  Pitt  took  pains  to  see 
that  the  Colonies  were  in  part  reimbursed  for  their 
outlays  of  money.  Yet  the  finances  of  the  Province 
were  apt  to  be  in  arrears  and  confusion,  and  a  de- 
preciating paper  currency,  against  which  the  good 
sense  of  the  old  Governor  revolted,  made  the  rich 
richer  and  the  poor  poorer.  When  in  1762  the  lei- 
sure class  in  Portsmouth,  —  Wentworths,  Rindges, 
Livermores,  etc.,  —  with  the  tavern-keepers,  peti- 
tioned for  a  playhouse  in  the  wealthy  capital,  John 
Langdon,  then  first  coming  into  public  life  as  a 
"  selectman,"  and  several  hundred  of  the  more  sober 
and  active  of  the  citizens  remonstrated,  saying, 
among  other  things  :  — 


200  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

"  It  would  bring  on  many  burdens  and  difficulties,  in 
addition  to  those  we  have  so  lately  suffered  for  want  of 
the  necessaries  of  life,  and  carry  off  the  little  remaining 
silver  and  gold  there  is  in  the  town.  Especially  con- 
sidering every  mouthful  of  bread  we  have  ate  has  been, 
for  many  months  past,  and  what  we  shall  use  must  be, 
for  many  yet  to  come,  imported,  we  apprehend  it  would 
be  destructive  to  the  circumstances  of  the  people,  as  well 
as  their  morals  :  and  as  the  poor  will  always  imitate  the 
richer,  every  servant  in  town  wiU  soon  turn  player.  For 
these  and  other  reasons,  —  which  your  Excellency  knows 
better  than  we  do,  heing  better  acquainted  with  things 
of  this  kind,,  —  we  humbly  pray  no  liberty  for  this  pur- 
pose may  be  granted,  at  such  a  remarkable  season  and 
time  as  this." 

The  sly  hit  at  the  hixurious  old  Governor,  who 
was  implied  to  be  a  play-goer,  and  whose  servant 
had  lately  turned  fine  lady,  was  appreciated  by  the 
people ;  and  this  must  have  been  one  of  the  first 
documents  addressed  to  them  by  Langdon,  who 
was  in  the  public  service  for  the  rest  of  his  long 
life.i 

There  seems  to  have  been  a  real  affection  in  New 
Hampshire  for  the  worthy  old  king  George  II, 
who  was  closing  his  life  as  his  armies  were  con- 

1  The  Portsmouth  idlers  got  their  playhouse  in  time,  but  not 
on  this  occasion.  They  had  had  a  newspaper  and  printing--house 
for  six  yeai's  (since  17'")6),  and  the  sermon  of  Dr.  Langdon,  soon  to 
he  quoted,  was  printed  by  Daniel  Fowle,  at  the  office  of  his  New 
Hampshire  Gazette,  which  still  exists,  and  is  the  oldest  extant 
paper  in  New  England. 


THE   SWITZERLAND   OF   AMERICA         201 

quering  Canada.  An  older  member  of  the  Lang- 
don  family,  Rev.  Samuel  Langdon  (then  preach- 
ing in  the  first  Portsmouth  parish,  and  chaplain 
of  the  Assembly),  in  a  sermon  on  the  king's  sev- 
enty-sixth birthday  (November  10,  1759)  and  in 
gratulation  for  the  conquest  of  Quebec,  said  of 
him :  — 

"  He  has  always  acted  as  under  a  proper  sense  of  his 
dependance  upon  God  ;  aiming  to  promote  justice  and 
virtue,  love  and  peace  in  the  nation,  and  secure  to  his 
subjects  their  civil  rights,  and  the  most  valuable  liberty, 
that  of  conscience.  He  has  never  attempted  to  deprive 
the  people  of  any  of  their  privileges ;  the  spirit  of  his 
reign  has  been  the  most  opposite  to  every  degree  of  tyr- 
anny and  ojjpression  ;  and  it  is  no  inconsiderable  part 
of  the  glory  of  it  that  he  never  vpould  suffer  any  of  the 
several  denominations  of  Christians  to  be  compelled  to 
worship  God  contrary  to  the  real  free  persuasion  of  their 
own  minds." 

These  compliments  were  deserved,  in  spite  of 
some  imperfections  of  temper  and  morals  in  the 
sturdy  Hanoverian.  He  died  the  next  year,  and 
the  grandson  who  succeeded  him  earned  a  very 
different  reputation  in  New  Hampshire.  But  at 
first  George  III  raised  good  hoj^es,  reappointed 
the  aged  Governor,  in  spite  of  charges  against 
him,  was  complimented  by  Parson  Langdon  in  the 
name  of  his  brother  ministers  in  September,  1761, 
and  urged  to  perpetuate  the  privileges  of  the  New 
Hampshire  churches. 


202  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

Governor  Wentworth  went  on  granting  new 
towns  in  both  halves  of  his  Switzerland,  until 
George  III,  no  longer  so  favorable  to  New  Hamp- 
shire as  his  grandfather  had  been,  by  royal  decree 
confirmed  the  claim  of  New  York  to  the  whole  of 
what  is  now  Vermont,  in  1764.  Among  the  first 
towns  that  he  had  chartered  was  that  most  cele- 
brated one,  named  for  himself,  Bennington,  where 
thirty  years  afterward.  Stark  and  the  men  of  New 
Hampshire  defeated  the  Hessian  mercenaries  of 
King  George.  It  is  on  the  extreme  western  border 
of  New  Hampshire's  claim,  —  indeed,  the  battle  was 
mainly  in  what  is  now  New  York.  The  excessive 
fees  and  reservations  made  in  these  town  grants, 
to  enrich  the  Governor  and  his  kindred,  became 
subjects  of  complaint  against  him  in  London, 
and  the  king  was  about  to  remove  him  in  1766. 
His  charming  young  nephew,  afterward  Sir  John 
Wentworth,  being  in  England,  and  paying  court  to 
the  nobles  Rockingham,  Hillsborough,  and  Straf- 
ford, for  whom  he  afterwards  in  gratitude  named 
the  counties  of  his  native  Province,  prevailed  on 
the  Council  to  allow  his  uncle  to  resign,  and  was 
himself  appointed  the  successor.  He  was  also  given 
an  important  office  for  the  whole  thirteen  Colonies 
(Surveyor  of  the  King's  Woods),  and  in  qualifying 
for  that  duty  he  landed  at  Charleston  in  Carolina 
in  1767,  and  came  slowly  up  the  Atlantic  coast  by 
land  to  his  provincial  capital,  Portsmouth.  There 
he  was  received  with  a  genuine  welcome,  due  to 


THE   SWITZERLAND   OF   AMERICA         203 

his  agreeable  character  and  the  extent  of  his  family 
influence. 

Up  to  this  time  few  approaches  had  been  made, 
except  by  bold  explorers  and  trappers,  to  the  White 
Mountains,  which  gave  the  name  Switzerland  to 
the  Province.  But  the  new  Governor  laid  out  his 
country  estate,  at  a  great  cost,  in  the  new  town  of 
Wolfeborough  (named  for  the  victor  at  Quebec), 
lying  on  the  road  to  the  high  mountains,  and  so 
turned  the  stream  of  migration  in  that  direction. 
The  forest  was  now  freed  of  Indian  marauders  and 
Jesuits  hunting  Puritan  families  to  convert  them 
to  the  old  religion ;  and  by  the  time  John  Went- 
worth  had  exiled  himself  from  his  government  in 
1775,  the  "  Notches  "  of  the  Conway  and  Franconia 
mountains  were  passes  for  occasional  travel,  and 
openings  into  a  region  to  which  the  patriots  could 
retire,  should  the  armies  of  the  king  occupy  the 
seaboard,  in  the  contest  soon  to  grow  bitter.  The 
occasion  never  came,  and  the  brave  little  Colony 
was  never  a^ain  invaded. 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE    REVOLUTION    AND    ITS    SEQUEL 

Never  was  a  Province  better  disposed  to  satisfac- 
tion with  itself,  its  Governor,  or  its  King,  than  was 
New  Hampshire  at  the  close  of  Benning  Went- 
worth's  administration  and  the  accession  to  power 
of  his  handsome  and  amiable  nephew,  John  Went- 
worth.  The  conquest  of  Canada  had  removed  for- 
ever the  danger  of  savage  invasion  and  the  captivity 
and  conversion  of  children.  The  poj^ulatio)!  was 
fast  increasing,  new  towns  were  springing  np  along 
the  border  of  the  receding  wilderness;  trade  was 
growing,  manufactures  beginning  on  a  simple  but 
useful  scale ;  the  local  governments  were  demo- 
cratic, and  every  good  man  had  his  chance  to  hold 
office  and  show  his  capacity  for  leading  other  men. 
Monarchy  and  aristocracy  had  their  modest  share 
in  the  provincial  government  ;  but  the  young  king 
was  a  true  Englishman,  faithful  to  his  wife  and  his 
Goi'onation  oath,  and  had  not  yet  been  persuaded 
into  the  folly  of  taxing  tliL'  colonies  without  giving 
them  representation.  The  Stamp  Act  had  been 
passed,  but  repealed,  in  deference  to  the  opposi- 
tion of  the  larger  colonies,  and  the  protest  of  com- 


THE  REVOLUTION  AND   ITS  SEQUEL     205 

mercial  England  and  that  idol  of  New  England, 
the  elder  Pitt.  A  group  of  families  held  the  chief 
offices  in  New  Hampshire,  but  the  men  who  filled 
them  were  mostly  native-born,  and  represented 
earlier  struggles  in  which  they  or  their  fathers  had 
taken  the  side  of  the  people ;  they  were  modest, 
well-bred  men,  for  the  most  part,  ready  for  any 
service  the  public  interest  might  require,  and  liv- 
ing simply  if  wealthy,  or  still  more  simply  if  poor, 
as  several  of  them  were.  Taxation  was  heavy%  for 
the  cost  of  the  seven  years'  war  was  great ;  but  its 
result  had  been  so  glorious  that  public  discontent 
hardly  existed.  John,  son  of  Mark  Wentworth,  the 
last  of  the  governors  of  that  name,  was  in  the 
prime  of  life,  hardly  thirty,  when  appointed  to  suc- 
ceed his  uncle,  and  less  than  thirty-two  when  he 
took  the  chair  in  March,  1768.  He  had  graduated 
at  Harvard  College  in  the  class  with  John  Adams 
(1755),  two  years  before  his  cousin,  young  Theo- 
dore Atkinson,  whose  youthful  widow,  his  beautiful 
Boston  cousin,  Frances  Wentworth,  he  married  in 
his  second  year  as  governor ;  and  had  spent  much 
time  in  England,  managing  important  affairs  and 
making  friends  with  leading  noblemen,  who  re- 
mained friendly  during  his  later  and  less  prosperous 
life.  As  governor  he  quieted  most  of  the  feuds  his 
uncle  and  cousins  had  raised,  but  had  one  inveterate 
enemy,  Peter  Livius,  of  foreign  birth,  who  took 
advantage  of  some  events  in  the  former  adminis- 
tration to  prefer  serious  charges  against  the  new 


206  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

governor.  These  were  practically  disproved  in 
England,  and  Livius  was  given  an  appointment 
in  Canada,  to  avoid  a  renewal  of  the  controversy  in 
the  small  provincial  capital  of  Portsmouth,  where 
half  the  men  of  property  were  the  Governor's 
kindred. 

The  same  English  minister  who  had  repealed  the 
Stamp  Act  had  appointed  John  Wentworth  (him- 
self active  for  the  repeal)  Governor,  and  given 
him  his  other  office  extending  through  the  Colonies 
(Surveyor  of  the  King's  Woods).  As  in  pursuance 
of  this  duty  he  landed  in  South  Carolina,  and  made  • 
his  way  northward,  proclaiming  his  commission  in 
each  colony,  he  was  everywhere  received  with  favor 
from  his  connection  with  the  Marquis  of  Rocking- 
ham. In  the  division  of  counties  which  was  soon 
made,  he  gave  to  the  five  New  Hampshire  counties 
the  names  of  his  powerful  English  friends,  the 
Marquis,  the  Earl  of  Strafford,  the  Duke  of  Graf- 
ton, the  Earl  of  Hillsborough,  and  the  Earl  of 
Cheshire.^  In  granting  new  towns,  or  regranting 
those  which  his  uncle  had  unsuccessfully  allotted, 
he  also  took  pains  to  preserve  the  family  names  of 
his  English  friends  and  his  own  numerous  connec- 

^  To  these  five  counties  have  been  gradually  added  as  many 
more  by  division  of  the  older  ones,  —  Coos  (an  Indian  name),  from 
the  north  of  Grafton,  in  1803 ;  Merrimac,  from  Rockingham  and 
Hillsborough,  in  1823 ;  Sullivan,  from  the  north  of  Cheshire,  in 
1827 ;  and  Belknap  and  Carroll,  from  Strafford  and  Grafton,  in 
1842.  Sullivan  took  the  General's  name,  and  Belknap  that  of  the 
first  state  historian.   Carroll  was  named  for  Charles  of  CarroUton. 


THE  REVOLUTION  AND  ITS  SEQUEL     207 

tions.  His  grandfather,  John  Rindge,  who  had 
done  much  to  defeat  the  Massachusetts  boundary 
claim,  had  one  of  the  towns  of  1768  named  for 
him  ;  and  Mrs.  Wentworth  gave  her  name  to  Fran- 
cestown,  and  her  mother's  name  to  Deering.  Lou- 
don, Fitzwilliam,  and  Shelburne  still  bear  the 
names  of  noblemen.  Another  earl.  Lord  Dart- 
mouth, soon  became  a  patron  of  the  new  college 
which  Governor  Wentworth  did  more  to  found 
than  either  Dr.  Wheelock  or  his  patron,  whose 
name  the  college  perpetuates.  Through  the  Went- 
worth influence,  nearly  50,000  acres  of  land  in  the 
Province  and  in  Vermont  were  granted  to  Dart- 
mouth College,  which  opened  its  doors  in  1770,  and 
graduated  its  first  class  of  four  in  the  next  year,  to 
each  of  whom  the  Governor  gave  land  for  a  farm. 
He  also  attracted  to  the  Province,  or  retained  there 
by  appointments,  able  men  from  other  colonies, 
such  as  Benjamin  Thompson,  afterward  Count 
Rumford,  and  Edward  Lutwyche,  —  both  loyalists 
and  exiles  a  few  years  later,  along  with  the  Gov- 
ernor himself.  In  his  own  favorite  new  town  of 
Wolfeborough,  the  Governor  laid  out  a  large  es- 
tate and  built  a  country  house,  after  the  fashion  of 
English  gentlemen,  upon  which  he  expended,  as  he 
afterwards  said,  more  than  i50,000.^   He  thus  gave 

1  His  whole  estate,  valued  at  some  £20,000,  was  confiscated  in 
the  Revolution,  but  did  not  become  available  for  expenses  of  the 
war,  being'  left  for  management  in  the  hands  of  his  father,  Mark 
Hunking  Wentworth,  who  sided  with  the  patriots,  but  did  not 


208  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

employment  to  many  men,  and  in  every  way  en- 
couraged industr}^  and  the  arts  in  his  government. 

take  an  active  part  in  affairs,  dying  in  December,  1785.  Writing 
from  Halifax  to  Edward  Wiuslow,  a  loyalist  self-exiled  from 
Plymouth.  Mass.,  in  March,  178G,  Sir  John  Wentworth  said  :  "  In 
this  vicinity  there  is  nobody  that  has  seen  my  estate  at  Wolfboro. 
I  had  selected  the  best  of  all  my  property  in  that  country,  granted 
in  the  large  measure  usual  for  such  cases,  —  4387  acres,  but 
amounted  nearer  to  6000.  It  was  subject  to  no  service  or  quit- 
rent,  a  shire,  market-and-f air-town,  in  the  centre  of  a  fertile  and 
populous  country.  The  roads  were  made  ;  the  Park  (substantially 
fenced  in)  about  GOO  acres ;  in  it  a  saw-mill  and  grist-mill  com- 
plete. The  house  is  102  feet  long,  41  wide,  24  or  25  feet  in  the 
posts ;  built  of  the  best,  and  by  the  best  workmen  ;  two  stable 
and  coach  houses,  62  by  40,  24  feet  posts,  built  for  duration, 
glazed  and  painted  completely.  One  barn  framed,  boarded,  shin- 
gled, painted,  and  as  complete  as  possible,  — 106  ft.  long,  32  to 
40  wide,  and  18  to  22  high  ;  a  large  dairy  house,  smoke  house  and 
ashes  house.  Carpenter's,  blacksmith's,  and  cabinet-maker's  shops, 
with  all  possible  instruments  and  tools  ;  cattle,  sheep,  horses, 
small  stock,  boats,  implements,  and  furmture  of  all  sorts,  com- 
plete and  in  super-abundance.  The  whole  included,  I  think  the 
4387  acres  are  under-valued  at  £5  sterling  per  acre  (X22,000).  I 
am  sure,  had  I  put  the  cash  it  cost  me  into  the  Boston  treasury, 
the  sum  would  have  far  exceeded.  In  1774  the  produce  on  that 
estate  exceeded  the  consumption  of  my  whole  family  ;  and  you 
know  how  we  lived.  And  every  year  it  became  more  valuable 
without  cost.  In  my  estimation  I  put  the  whole  at  £20,000  ster- 
ling. I  shall  be  obliged  if  you  will  be  so  good  as  to  mention  your 
opinion  of  my  general  establishment  in  town  and  country,  —  for 
houses,  gardens,  furniture,  servants,  equipages,  horses,  &c.,  — 
whether  they  were  good,  plentiful,  and  becoming  my  rank  in  that 
country,  in  proportion  to  what  was  done  by  other  Governors  and 
men  of  fortune  in  America." 

In  fact,  though  his  town  house  in  Portsmouth  Avas  not  very 
magnificent,  it  is  doubtful  if  any  man  north  of  Maryland  had  a 
finer  country  estate.    It  was  smaller  in  area,  but  better  built  and 


THE   REVOLUTION  AND   ITS   SEQUEL      209 

The  rest  of  the  gentry  of  the  Province,  with  the 
clergymen  of  all  denominations,  were  his  friends, 
and  perhaps  no  governor,  before  or  since,  was  more 
popular  with  all  classes.  His  own  nature  was 
manly  and  attractive,  without  vices,  and  with  fair 
if  not  distinguished  abilities  ;  a  sincere  Christian 
and  a  good  citizen,  and  from  his  office  and  char- 
acter the  first  citizen  in  northern  New  England  for 
a  time. 

The  agitation  for  independence  was  unknown  in 
New  Hampshire  until  after  the  fight  at  Concord  and 
Lexington ;  but  the  manifest  purpose  of  the  king 
to  tax  the  Colonies,  and  the  severity  of  his  measures 
against  Boston,  after  the  Tea  Party  of  December, 
1773,  roused  the  yeomen  and  mechanics  and  for- 
esters of  Wentworth's  Province  to  resistance.  The 
merchants  and  clergy  had  remained  neutral,  largely 
by  reason  of  the  Governor's  popularity,  and  the  ex- 
tent of  his  family  connection  and  influence.  Young 
lawyers  like  John  Sullivan,  who  had  established  him- 
self in  practice  at  Durham,  and  young  merchants 
like  John  Langdon,  who  had  returned  from  England 
fully  persuaded  of  the  evil  designs  of  the  ministry, 
took  the  patriotic  side,  and  had  warm  support  from 
the  country  towns,  but  the  older  towns  held  back. 

equipped  than  Washington's  Mt.  Vernon  was  at  that  time.  As 
returned  in  1791,  the  estate  was  much  less  in  value,  and  ag'ainst  it, 
in  17S5,  the  Governor's  father  had  claims  amounting  to  £13,680. 
But  it  is  not  likely  the  Governor's  estimate  was  excessive  as  to 
actual  cost  and  value  in  time  of  peace.  The  war  much  diminished 
the  value  of  real  property  in  New  Hampshire. 


210  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

A  Provincial  Congress  was  called  in  New  Hamp- 
shire, in  July,  1774,  after  the  regular  session  of  the 
Assembly  had  been  dissolved  by  the  Governor,  on 
account  of  its  forming  committees  of  correspondence 
with  the  other  colonies.  It  met  at  Exeter,  July  14, 
and  elected  Sullivan,  then  a  major  in  the  militia, 
and  Nathaniel  Folsom,  also  an  officer,  as  delegates 
to  the  Continental  Congress  in  Philadelphia.  This 
movement  toward  the  union  of  all  the  Colonies  was 
only  an  extension,  based  on  popular  agitation,  of 
that  which  in  1754  had  led  to  a  smaller  Congress 
at  Albany,  in  which  New  Hampshire  had  taken 
part,  and  was  represented,  with  the  approval  of  the 
government,  by  Colonel  Theodore  Atkinson,  then 
provincial  secretary,  and  Colonel  Meshech  Weare, 
then  one  of   the  leading  assemblymen.^  But   the 

1  The  journal  kept  by  Atkinson  on  this  expedition,  when  he 
made  the  journey  in  company  with  Colonel  Weare,  indicates 
how  difficult  was  travel  on  such  errands  in  1754.  The  two  gen- 
tlemen, —  Atkinson  fifty-seven  years  old  and  Weare  forty,  — 
went  on  horseback,  and  occupied  twelve  days  going  and  nine  in 
returning  from  Portsmouth  to  Albany,  and  vice  versa.  At  pre- 
sent it  would  take  but  twelve  hours,  and  a  tenth  part  of  the  ex- 
pense. Atkinson  set  out  at  8  A.  m.  June  5,  froni  his  Portsmouth 
house  near  the  waterside,  rode  fifteen  miles  to  Hampton  Falls, 
dined  there  with  Colonel  Weare,  and  passed  the  first  night  at  Ha- 
verhill. On  the  Gtli  they  reached  Cambridge,  where  young  Atkin- 
son was  in  college,  lodged  with  President  Holyoke,  and  the  next 
day  dined  with  Mr.  Vassall,  and  got  as  far  as  Sudbury.  On  the 
Sth  they  reached  Worcester,  where  they  spent  Sunday.  By  the 
llth  they  had  reached  Springfield,  on  the  12th  Hartford,  and  were 
crossing  the  Livingston  Manor  in  New  York  on  the  loth.  In  Al- 
bany they  met  Dr.  Franklin,  had  a  colloquy  with  the  Indians, 


THE   REVOLUTION   AND   ITS   SEQUEL     211 

object  of  the  Congress  of  twenty  years  later  was 
so  manifestly  for  resistance,  in  some  form,  to  the 
ministerial  measures,  that  Governor  Wentworth 
felt  bound  to  oppose  it.  He  was  unsuccessful,  and 
beofan  to  have  fears  that  his  moderate  course  and 
general  popularity  could  not  prevent  New  Hamp- 
shire from  followins:  what  he  thou2:ht  the  ill  exam- 
pie  of  Boston.  These  fears  were  confirmed  when, 
in  December  (the  15th),  1774,  a  party,  headed  by 
Sullivan  and  Langdon,  captured  the  fort  at  New 
Castle,  removed  to  Durham,  near  Sullivan's  house, 
one  hundred  barrels  of  powder,  and  sent  most  of 
the  cannon  and  small  arms  to  other  places  of  safe- 
keeping, in  anticipation  of  the  war  which  they  fore- 
saw. It  was  with  this  powder,  the  next  June,  that 
the  patriots  fought  the  battle  of  Bunker  Hill.  Six 
weeks  later,  in  a  letter  written  to  his  Dover  friend, 
T.  W.  iWaldron,  Wentworth  related  how  Langdon 
and  Sullivan  dominated  the  second  Provincial  Con- 
gress, which  indeed  chose  them  delegates  to  the 
Congress  at  Philadelphia.  But  at  first  the  Hamp- 
ton Falls  members.  Colonel  Weare  and  Kev.  Paine 
Wingate,  tried  to  stem  the  rising  tide,  and  were  re- 
fused a  hearing.  Weare,  now  a  judge,  speaking  for 
moderation,  was  interrupted  with  cries  of  "  Tory 
nonsense  !  We  've  had  enough  of  it !  "  and  when 
he  next  became  prominent,  it  was  as  chairman  of 
the  new  Committee  of  Safety,  which  virtually  gov- 

remainefl  on  duty  in  the  Congress  until  July  10,  and  on  the  11th 
started  to  return  through  Sprin^eld. 


212  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

ei'ned  the  Province  until  it  became  a  State  in  1776. 
He  was  in  fact  elected  by  tins  body,  which  called 
itself  a  Convention  and  had  a  hundred  and  forty- 
four  members,  one  of  a  committee  of  seven,  with 
a  cousin  of  the  Governor,  John  Wentworth  of 
Somersworth,  at  its  head,  to  call  another  convention. 
This  met  in  Exeter  upon  the  news  of  the  Lexing- 
ton fight,  with  about  seventy  members,  from  half 
as  many  towns,  who  were  soon  joined  by  forty  more 
from  thirty-seven  towns.  They  put  themselves  in 
communication  with  Warren  and  Adams  of  the  Mas- 
sachusetts Provincial  Congress,  and  began  to  raise 
soldiers  for  the  war.  A  fourth  Provincial  Congress 
met  in  May,  with  a  still  larger  attendance  of  mem- 
bers. The  president  of  it  was  Matthew  Thornton, 
who  afterward  signed  the  Declaration  of  Independ- 
ence, and  it  was  evident  that  many  of  the  mem- 
bers favored  a  separation  from  Great  Britain.  This 
convention  raised  soldiers,  and  voted  supplies  and 
arms  ;  it  also  (June  8,  1775)  addressed  a  letter  of 
remonstrance  to  Governor  Wentworth,  for  his  ru- 
mored request  to'  have  British  troops  sent  into  the 
Province.  Then  it  raised  money  by  issuing  bills  of 
credit,  and  demanded  and  took  possession  of  the 
Province  records,  so  far  as  they  could  be  obtained 
from  the  members  of  the  provincial  government. 

In  the  mean  time,  more  important  measures  than 
mere  votes  and  addresses  from  the  assemblies  and 
the  Governor  had  been  taking  place.  On  the  19th 
of  April  the  first  battle  had  occurred,  beginning 


THE  REVOLUTION  AND   ITS  SEQUEL     213 

at  Lexington,  renewed  at  Concord,  and  continued 
through  the  whole  day  upon  the  retreat  of  the  in- 
vaders. New  Hampshire  was  represented,  even  in 
this  unexpected  and  impromptu  fight,  by  one  or  more 
experienced  soldiers,  who  had  fought  in  the  French 
war  ;  and  when  the  swift  horsemen  carried  the  news 
of  the  combat  over  the  border  into  Wentworth's 
Province,  the  angry  muster  of  thousands  began 
there.  Stark,  receiving  the  message  at  his  saw-mill 
in  Dumbarton,  mounted  and  rode  night  and  day  to 
Cambridge,  where  he  was  soon  put  in  command  of 
a  regiment,  many  of  whom  had  been  with  him  in 
dangerous  battle  and  ambush  around  Ticonderoga. 
The  enlistment  of  New  Hampshire  soldiers  went 
on  rapidly,  and  before  June  1  more  than  two  thou- 
sand were  under  arms,  and  three  regiments  were  in 
the  neighborhood  of  Boston,  where  General  Gage 
was  besieged  by  a  New  England  army  of  at  least 
fifteen  thousand  men,  commanded  by  General  Arte- 
mas  Ward  of  Massachusetts.  A  New  Hampshire 
clergyman,  Dr.  Samuel  Langdon,  had  left  Ports- 
mouth the  autumn  before  to  take  the  presidency 
of  Harvard  College,  and  around  his  house  and  the 
halls  of  study  this  army  was  encamped  and  under- 
going discipline.  Before  June  17  Governor  Went- 
worth  had  taken  refuge  at  the  fort  of  New  Castle, 
and  on  that  day  the  British  attack  on  the  redoubt 
at  Bunker  Hill  was  made  and  twice  repulsed  by 
men  who  fought  with  New  Hampshire  powder,  and 
of   whom  a  majority  were  New  Hampshire  men. 


214  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

In  the  final  assault,  wlien  Warren  fell,  the  slow 
retreat  of  Prescott  and  his  men  was  covered  by  the 
cool  and  sagacious  Stark,  who  had  piled  the  British 
dead  in  windrows  at  the  front  of  his  own  line  of 
battle.  Several  New  Hampshire  officers  were  killed 
or  wounded  in  the  fight  or  retreat ;  but  their  loss 
was  trifling  compared  with  the  slaughter  inflicted 
on  the  British  officers  and  men  by  the  deadly  fire 
of  marksmen  from  the  woods  of  New  Hampshire. 
After  this  battle,  when  the  Governor,  from  "  Cas- 
tle William  and  Mary,"  required  of  his  aged  uncle, 
Theodore  Atkinson,  "  the  books  and  charters  in 
the  Secretary's  office,"  that  official  was  obliged  to 
reply  that  the  Provincial  Congress  had  sent  a  com- 
mittee to  demand  of  him  all  his  records  and  files, 
and  had  forcibly  removed  them  to  Exeter,  the  seat 
of  the  de  facto  government.  The  ei^ht  years'  war 
had  begun. 

All  through  this  war  of  the  Revolution,  the  small 
and  impoverished  Province,  soon  to  be  the  State  of 
New  Hampshire,  "  behaved  itself  as  a  party  to  the 
contest,"  as  Emerson  said  of  his  town  of  Concord. 
Its  soldiers  made  themselves  felt  in  every  campaign 
and  almost  in  every  battle.  Their  officers.  Stark,- 
Reed,  Poor,  Cilley,  Sullivan,  Dearborn,  Scammell, 
distino'uished  themselves  wherever  distinction  was 
to  be  won.  John  Sullivan  from  a  provincial  Major 
was  made  a  Continental  Brigadier,  partly,  no  doubt, 
from  his  ardent  eloquence  and  Irish  zeal  for  the 
fight,  without  the  calm  and  considerate  hardihood 


THE  REVOLUTION   AND   ITS   SEQUEL      215 

of  Stark.  He  had  not  Stark's  skill  in  conducting 
a  campaign,  although  in  1779,  when  he  led  an  army 
of  three  thousand  men  to  destroy  the  Indian  habita- 
tions and  cornfields  on  the  Chemung  and  Susque- 
hanna rivers,  in  southern  New  York,  his  success 
was  complete.  By  sea,  also,  the  New  Hampshire 
men  were  active  and  achieved  good  results.  The 
first  vessel  of  Paul  Jones,  the  Ranger,  was  built 
by  John  Langdon,  and  fitted  for  fighting  at  Ports- 
mouth, where  shipbuilding  had  long  been'  carried 
on.  The  officers  and  crew  of  the  Ranger  were 
mainly  from  the  Pascataqua  region,  and  some  of 
them  had  a  hand  in  the  renowned  sea-fight  between 
the  Poor  Richard  and  the  Serapis,  where  Jones 
was  the  hei'o  of  the  day. 

While  every  State  of  the  original  Thirteen,  and 
even  the  incipient  and  disputed  State  of  Vermont, 
was  invaded  during  this  wai",  New  Hampshire  alone 
escaped.  Its  position  and  its  comparative  poverty 
account  in  some  degree  for  this.  But  its  soldiers 
had  early  acquired  that  name  for  desperate  valor 
which  attaches  to  the  people  of  certain  countries,  — 
to  Scotland,  Ireland,  and  Switzerland,  for  instance, 
—  and  the  State  profited  by  this.  In  the  invasion 
of  New  York  from  Canada  by  Burgoyne,  in  1777, 
he  sent  a  strong  detachment  into  Vermont,  which 
seemed  to  threaten  the  western  settlements  of  New 
Hampshire.  Indeed,  the  whole  of  Vermont  was 
then  claimed  by  President  Weare  and  his  col- 
leagues in  New  Hampshire  as  part  of  their  domain. 


216  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

Accordingly,  General  Stark,  who  had  been  unwar- 
rantably passed  over  in  some  promotions  by  Con- 
gress, and  who  had  thereupon  resigned  from  Wash- 
ington's army,  was  called  upon  by  his  native  State 
to  defend  her  and  to  repel  the  invasion.  He  ac- 
cepted the  task  at  once,  took  command  of  a  small 
army,  mostly  made  up  of  New  Hampshire  natives, 
marched  across  the  whole  breadth  of  New  Hamp- 
shire and  Vermont,  and  defeated  Burgoyne's  de- 
tachment in  what  is  now  New  York.  Bennington, 
which  gives  its  name  to  this  battle  (fought  in  Au- 
gust, 1777),  was  left  in  Vermont  by  the  border  line 
agreed  upon  by  Congress  in  1782  ;  but  the  actual 
fortification  made  by  Colonel  Baum  and  his  Hes- 
sians, which  Stark  assaulted  and  carried,  was  west 
of  that  line. 

This  battle  ended  the  advance  of  Burgoyne 
southward,  and  was  the  first  step  in  that  series  of 
events  which  closed  the  military  life  of  Burgoyne, 
and  led  to  the  French  alliance  and  the  recognition 
of  American  independence.  Up  to  January,  1776, 
whatever  individuals  may  have  wished,  the  general 
sentiment  of  New  Hampshire  was  for  a  restoration 
of  the  old  relation  between  the  Colony  and  the 
parent  kingdom.  The  fifth  Exeter  Provincial  Con- 
gress, elected  late  in  1775,  after  the  departure  of 
Governor  Wentworth,  and  convened  December  21, 
still  called  New  Hampshire  a  "  Colony,"  and  while 
providing  a  brief  form  of  government  substan- 
tially like  that  before  existing,  omitting  the  royal 


THE   REVOLUTION   AND   ITS   SEQUEL     217 

Governor  and  Council,  felt  called  on  to  protest  and 
declare,  — 

''  That  we  never  souglit  to  throw  off  our  dependence 
upon  Gi-eat  Britain,  but  felt  ourselves  hajjtpy  under  her 
protection,  while  we  could  enjoy  our  constitutional  rights 
and  privileges  ;  and  that  we  siiall  rejoice  if  such  a  re- 
conciliation between  us  and  our  parent  State  can  be  ef- 
fected as  shall  be  approved  by  the  Continental  Congress, 
in  whose  prudence  and  wisdom  we  confide." 

This  was  a  sincere  statement.  Its  date  was  Jan- 
uary 5, 1776,  and  the  Committee  of  Safety,  already 
existing,  now  became  the  Council,  under  this  Con- 
stitution, or  were  chosen  from  it  to  act  during 
the  interval  of  legislative  sessions.  The  committee 
whicli  reported  the  plan  included  Mesliech  Weare, 
Matthew  Thornton,  Wyseman  Claggett,  and  Eben- 
ezer  Thompson,  —  the  first  named  being  the  acting 
Governor  and  soon  Chief  Justice  of  the  Colony, 
and  the  last  named.  Secretary.  They  continued  to 
hold  these  places  until  the  war  ended  in  1783,  — 
indeed  until  June,  1784,  when  an  elaborate  Con- 
stitution, adopted  in  October,  1783,  and  based  on 
John  Adams's  Massachusetts  Constitution  of  1780, 
took  effect.  But  hardly  had  the  new  government 
organized,  with  an  implied  agreement  to  reunite 
with  England  under  just  conditions,  when  the 
extreme  severity  and  unwisdom  of  King  George 
began  to  turn  the  thoughts  of  the  people  to  inde- 
pendence.   The  first  elected  Assembly,  now  styled 


218  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

the  House  of  Representatives,  began  to  agitate  the 
question  early  in  June,  1776,  and  on  the  11th  of 
that  month  named  Samuel  Cutts  of  Portsmouth, 
Timothy  Walker  of  Concord,  and  John  Dudley  of 
Raymond  a  committee  "  to  make  a  draft  of  a  de- 
claration of  this  General  Assembly  for  independ- 
ence of  the  United  Colonies  on  Great  Britain." 
Four  days  later,  and  three  weeks  before  Congress 
adoj)ted  Jefferson's  Declaration,  this  committee  re- 
ported, and  both  houses  adopted,  the  first  authorita- 
tive statement  of  the  purpose  to  cast  off  allegiance 
to  Great  Britain.  After  reciting  that  "  the  British 
ministiy,  arbitrary  and  vindictive,  are  determined 
to  reduce  by  fire  and  sword  our  bleeding  country 
to  their  absolute  obedience,"  and  that  "  foreign 
mercenaries  "  and  a  formidable  fleet  are  on  the 
way  "  to  ravage  and  plunder  the  sea-coast,"  the 
declaration  goes  on,  — 

"  Whereas  we,  of  this  colony  of  New  Hampshire, 
have  the  example  of  the  most  respectable  of  our  sister 
colonies  before  us  for  entering  upon  that  most  important 
step  of  a  disunion  from  Great  Britain,  and  declaring 
us  free  and  independent  of  the  Crown  thereof  ;  and  it 
appearing  absolutely  necessary,  in  this  most  critical  junc- 
ture of  our  public  affairs,  that  the  honorable  the  Conti- 
nental Congress,  who  have  this  important  object  under 
their  immediate  consideration,  should  be  also  informed 
of  our  resolutions  thereon,  without  loss  of  time  ; 

"  We  do  liereby  declare  that  it  is  the  opinion  of  this 
assembly  tliat  our  delegates  at  the  Continental  Congress 


THE  REVOLUTION  AND   ITS  SEQUEL     219 

should  be  instructed,  and  they  are  hereby  instructed,  to 
join  with  the  other  colonies  in  declaring  the  thirteen 
United  Colonies  a  free  and  independent  State,  —  sol- 
emnly pledging  our  faith  and  honor  that  we  will,  on  our 
parts,  support  the  measure  with  our  lives  and  fortunes ; 
and  that,  in  consequence  thereof,  they,  the  Continental 
Congress,  on  whose  wisdom,  fidelity  and  integrity  we 
rely,  may  enter  into  and  form  such  alliances  as  they  may 
judge  conducive  to  the  present  safety  and  future  advan- 
tage of  these  American  colonies ;  provided  the  regula- 
tion of  our  internal  police  be  under  the  direction  of  our 
own  Assembly." 

The  similarity  in  several  respects  of  the  language 
here  used  to  that  afterwards  employed  by  Jeffer- 
son and  Adams  hints,  what  I  suppose  to  be  the 
fact,  that  the  Adamses  had  communicated  with 
Weare,  Thornton,  etc.,  in  regard  to  independence. 
At  the  same  time,  the  word  "  alliances  "  points  to 
what  was  a  strong  motive  with  Franklin  and  Wash- 
ington, —  the  desire  to  use  the  jealousy  of  England 
among  the  European  Powers  for  the  formation  of 
some  powerful  alliance,  like  that  with  France, 
which,  long  under  consideration,  did  actually  fol- 
low the  surrender  of  Burgoyne  in  1777.  It  may 
then  be  seen  that  New  Hampshire  had  a  strong  in- 
fluence, first  in  bringing  the  more  doubting  patri- 
ots to  a  belief  in  Independence,  and  then  in  giving 
France  the  opportunity  (by  checking  the  advance 
and  compelling  the  surrender  of  Burgoyne)  to  do 
what  she  wished,  and  ally  herself  with  us. 


220  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

The  organization  of  government  in  New  Hamp- 
shire, after  the  departure  of  Governor  Wentworth 
and  the  removal  from  office  of  his  kinsmen  in  the 
Council,  showed  plainly  what  sort  of  citizens  in- 
habited the  Colony.  The  magistrates  no  longer  held 
office,  the  courts  were  closed,  but  all  the  functions 
of  government  went  on  under  the  system  of  town 
self-government,  which  had  grown  up  instead  of 
the  squirearchy  and  lieutenancy^  that  the  grantees  of 
great  estates  had  vainly  sought  to  introduce  from 
England.  More  than  a  hundred  towns,  representing 
an  average  of  a  thousand  people  each,  came  to- 
gether in  the  Pi-ovincial  Congress,  at  Exeter,  —  re- 
moved by  the  short  interval  of  a  dozen  miles  from 
the  influence  of  wealth  and  royal  appointments  in 
the  seaport  capital.  Their  first  care  was  to  establish 
post-offices,  which  the  royal  government  had  too 
much  neglected  ;  these  were  needful  to  keep  the 
towns  in  communication  with  each  other  and  with 
the  suddenly  raised  army.  They  next  established  a 
Committee  of  Supply  for  the  army,  and  the  Cojja- 
mittee  of  Safety  already  mentioned,  which  directed 
all  affairs  of  the  Colony  with  more  efficiency  than 
tlie  royai'Council  had  usually  done.  Its  seat  was  at 
Exeter  ;  its  members  wei-e  country  physicians  like 
Thornton  and  Thompson,  country  justices  and 
farmers  like  Weare  and  Dudley,  with  an  occasional 
man  from  the  learned  professions ;  its  head  was  in 
tlie  smalltown  of  Hampton  Falls,  where  Pi^esident 
Weare,  in  his  unpretending  but  comfortable  home, 


THE   REVOLUTION   AND   ITS   SEQUEL     221 

overlooking  the  ocean  at  Hampton,  four  miles  away, 
gave  audience  and  dinners  to  committee-men,  com- 
manders, officials  from  Massachusetts,  and  foreign 
travelers.  He  made  his  daily  trips  to  Exeter,  seven 
miles  westward,  on  his  jogging  horse,  returning  at 
night  to  his  own  farm,  or,  if  detained  by  business, 
lodoius:  with  the  colonial  treasurer,  Nicholas  Gil- 
man,  whose  farm  was  larger  and  his  house  more 
spacious,  in  the  township  bought  by  Wheelwright 
from  the  Indians.  Both  Weare  and  Gilman  were 
descended  from  ancestors  who  had  helped  carry 
the  Colony  safely  through  the  troubles  with  Robert 
Mason  and  the  Stuarts  :  they  had  a  hereditary 
claim  on  the  popularity  they  enjoyed,  and  their 
justice  and  good  faith  were  known  throughout  the 
county  which  they  had  served  in  offices,  humble 
or  important,  but  always  neighborly,  for  a  whole 
generation.  They  knew  the  local  officers  of  the 
towns,  had  sat  with  them  on  juries  and  in  town 
meetings,  worshiped  with  them  in  the  plain  meet- 
ing-houses, conducted  their  funerals,  solemnized 
their  marriages,  drawn  up  their  land-titles,  settled 
their  estates,  and  in  every  possible  way  had  come 
to  their  notice  and  merited  confidence.  Hence  the 
complete  understanding  that  usually  existed  be- 
tween the  general  and  the  local  authority  in  the 
extemporized  revolutionary  government,  which  was 
in  fact  only  revolutionary  in  name,  'Squire  Weare 
and  'Squire  Wentworth,  Dr.  Bartlett,  Dr.  Thomp- 
son, Dr.  Thornton,   'Squire   Dudley,  and  'Squire 


222  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

Claggett  had  managed  the  general  business  of  the 
towns  under  the  Portsmouth  oligarchy,  and  had 
sometimes  won  in  contests  with  them.  They  natu- 
rally took  charge  when  that  oligarchy  was  dis- 
possessed, and  its  supporters  in  the  country  towns 
either  joined  the  patriot  cause,  or  fled  the  country,  or 
came  under  suspicion  and  were  bound  over  to  good 
behavior,  or  languished  in  the  ill-appointed  wooden 
jails.  As  Dr.  Belknap  says,  who  saw  the  whole  trans- 
formation, and  had  good  friends  on  both  sides :  — 

"  The  Provincial  Convention  directed  the  general 
affairs  of  the  war,  and  town  committees  had  a  discre- 
tionary but  undefined  power  to  preserve  domestic  peace. 
Habits  of  decency,  family  government,  and  the  good 
examjile  of  influential  persons,  contributed  more  to  main- 
tain order  than  any  other  authority.  The  value  of  these 
secret  bonds  of  society  was  now  more  than  ever  con- 
spicuous." 

An  English  writer  of  clear  observation,  comment- 
ing on  the  American  constitutions  which  grew  up 
during  the  Revolution  and  soon  after,  once  said 
that  the  men  of  Massachusetts  could  make  any 
constitution  work  welh  The  same  was  even  more 
persistently  true  of  the  men  of  New  Hampshire, 
who  in  every  emergency  rose  quietly  to  the  occa- 
sion, and  sometimes  by  tumults,  sometimes  by 
town  meetings  or  committees,  held  nominal  rulers 
to  their  duty,  or  took  the  reins  calmly  into  their 
own  hands.    Even  the  disappointed  and  disaffected 


THE   REVOLUTION   AND   ITS   SEQUEL     223 

came  to  the  rescue  when  the  general  peace  was 
threatened.  There  was  in  the  little  town  of  New- 
ington  on  the  Pascataquaan  old  clergyman,  Joseph 
Adams,  uncle  of  John  Adams,  who  was  seventy -six 
years  of  age  when  the  royal  authority  collapsed. 
He  was  slow  to  see  what  would  follow,  and  his 
son,  Benjamin,  at  first  inclined  to  the  side  of  the 
mother  country.  His  disaffection  was  not  lessened 
by  the  unwillingness  of  the  town  to  pay  his  father's 
salary  in  silver,  as  the  contract  required,  and  he 
continued  under  some  suspicion,  though  holding 
town  offices  because  of  his  education.  After  the 
war,  he  desired  to  be  a  justice  of  the  peace,  and  his 
townsmen  objected ;  this  made  President  Sullivan 
and  the  Council  hesitate  to  appoint  him.  He  wrote 
an  angry  letter  to  John  Wentworth  of  Somersworth, 
his  friend  and  nearest  councilor,  in  which  he  re- 
counted what  share  he  had  in  suppressing  the  insur- 
rection at  Exeter  a  few  weeks  before,  saying,  — 

"  For  the  President  and  Council  to  hear  the  non- 
sensical rabble  against  men  of  influence  is  strange  and 
surprising.  I  stept  forward  the  other  day  to  support 
Government,  and  was  the  second  man  to  Col.  Brewster, 
who  stopped  the  insurgents  at  the  (Exeter)  Bridge,  till 
we  were  properly  reinforced  by  Gen.  Cilley  and  others, 
—  to  the  hazard  of  my  Ufa  and  horse  against  them."  ^ 

1  This  speedy  suppression  of  the  revolt  in  September,  1780,  by 
the  g-allantry  of  Sullivan  and  Cilley,  and  the  ready  response  of 
the  organized  militia  when  called  to  arms,  are  described  on  a  later 
page. 


224  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

If  so  (and  no  man  contradicted  him),  this  second 
cousin  of  President  Adams  must  have  mounted 
at  niglit  and  ridden  ten  miles  from  his  farm  to 
Exeter,  to  support  the  authorities,  who  there  made 
quick  Nvork  of  this  preliminary  to  the  Shays's  insur- 
rection in  Massachusetts.    And  throughout  the  lou^r 

o  o 

war,  while  disease  and  death  weakened  families, 
and  a  depreciated  currency,  added  to  the  confusion 
of  trade  and  industry  which  civil  commotions  create, 
impoverished  most  of  the  inhabitants,  no  serious 
trouble  arose  in  the  new  State.  The  wheels  of  civil 
and  ecclesiastical  government  continued  to  revolve 
as  of  old,  and  society  held  together  vmder  the  sim- 
plest and  homeliest  conditions.  The  plough  and  the 
axe  kept  at  work  in  farm  and  forest,  the  spinning- 
wheel  hummed,  and  the  household  shuttle  flew,  to 
clothe  and  feed  the  absent  soldier  and  the  bereaved 
family ;  the  minister  preached  and  prayed ;  the 
schools  went  on,  if  for  fewer  weeks,  and  the  popu- 
lation increased,  though  at  a  smaller  ratio  than 
before. 

New  Hampshire  maintained  three  regiments  in 
the  army  of  Washington  during  the  whole  contest, 
and  raised  many  more  soldiers  for  occasional  ser- 
vice. These  regiments  accompanied  Washington 
from  the  siege  of  Boston  to  New  York,  and  were 
engaged  in  the  unlucky  fights  of  that  region  in 
1776.  Some  of  them  went  under  General  Sullivan 
to  Canada,  when  Arnold  was  forced  to  retreat  after 
the  death  of  Montgomery,  and  had  hard  fortune 


THE   REVOLUTION   AND   ITS   SEQUEL     225 

there.  Sullivan  himself,  at  the  request  of  Wash- 
ington, after  the  capture  of  the  dilatory  and  finally 
treacherous  Charles  Lee,  hastened  forward  a  de- 
tachment of  this  northern  army  in  time  to  take 
part  under  Washington  in  the  brilliant  surprise  of 
Trenton,  December,  1776,  where  Stark  also  had 
his  usual  share  in  the  fighting  and  the  success.  Re- 
ceiving what  he  thought  shabby  treatment  from 
Congress  in  the  matter  of  promotions,  Colonel 
Stark  resigned,  and  returned  home  to  Starkstown, 
where  his  brother  William  and  his  nephew  had 
been  proscribed  as  Tories,  along  with  Stark's  old 
commander,  Rogers,  for  their  allegiance  to  the  Brit- 
ish crown,  under  which  they  had  taken  the  military 
oath.  But  no  thought  of  renouncing  his  country's 
cause  arose  in  John  Stark's  mind,  as  in  Arnold's 
three  years  later,  under  like  provocation.  He  had 
just  recruited  a  new  regiment,  when  in  March,  1777, 
he  received  word  that  Congress,  then  full  of  in- 
trigues against  Washington,  had  "  thought  proper 
to  promote  junior  officers  over  my  head,"  as  he  said 
in  resigning  his  command  to  the  New  Hampshire 
government.  He  added  a  hope  "  that  you  will 
make  choice  of  some  gentleman  to  succeed,  who 
may  honor  the  cause  and  his  country." 

Probably  he  foresaw  what  actually  happened, 
that  the  movement  of  Burgoyne  would  call  for 
his  services  in  a  separate  command,  to  protect  the 
State  against  invasion,  and  keep  New  England  in 
communication  with  the  army  of  Washington.    At 


226  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

any  rate,  in  July,  1777,  tliat  very  emergency  arose ; 
and  in  the  legislature  at  Exeter,  John  Langclou 
(the  wealthiest  merchant  remaining  in  Ports- 
mouth), being  Speaker  of  the  House,  made  the 
speech,  so  often  quoted,  which  offered  the  means  of 
repelling  Burgoyue :  — 

"I  have  S3000  in  hard  money;  my  plate  shall  be 
pledged  for  as  much  more ;  my  70  hogsheads  of  Tobago 
rum  shall  be  sold  for  the  most  they  will  fetch.  These 
are  at  the  service  of  the  State ;  if  we  succeed,  I  shall 
be  remunerated ;  if  not,  they  will  be  of  no  use  to  me. 
We  can  raise  a  brigade ;  our  friend  Stark,  who  so  nobly 
sustained  the  honor  of  New  Hampshire  at  Banker  Hill, 
may  safely  be  trusted  to  command,  and  we  will  check 
Burgoyne." 

So  said,  so  done.  In  one  short  and  active  month 
after  that  speech,  Genei'al  Stark,  at  Bennington, 
had  met  the  detachment  of  Hessians,  fought  two 
battles  in  one  day,  captured  or  slain  hundreds  of 
Burgoyne's  army,  and  made  the  defeat  of  the  rest 
only  a  question  of  time.  Next  to  Washington's 
stroke  at  Trenton  and  Princeton,  eight  months  be- 
fore, it  was  the  most  brilliant  and  momentous 
battle  of  the  war.  Congress,  already  regretting  its 
slight  to  Stark,  waited  in  vain  to  receive  a  report 
of  his  victory,  which  he  had  made  at  once  to  the 
legislatures  of  New  Hampshire  and  Massachusetts, 
accompanied  with  the  musket,  drum,  and  Hessian 
cap,  as  trophies  of  the  fight,  which  still  hang  in 
the  Boston    State  House.    Writing    to    Stark   to 


THE   REVOLUTION   AND   ITS   SEQUEL     227 

inquire  why  he  had  not  written,  the  committee  of 
Congress  were  told  "  that  General  Stark  snpposed 
his  correspondence  with  that  body  closed,  since  his 
last  letter  had  never  been  answered."  The  hint 
was  taken.  Stark  was  made  a  brigadier  in  the  regu- 
lar army,  and  continued  in  the  service  till  the  war 
ended. 

In  the  battles  which  preceded  and  followed 
Stark's  exploit  at  Bennington,  the  New  Hampshire 
troops  under  Schuyler  and  Gates  distinguished 
themselves,  and  Colonel  Cdley  of  Nottingham,  in 
particular,  fought  at  Saratoga  with  as  much  cour- 
age as  Arnold,  and  with  moi-e  coolness.  The  sol- 
diers of  Cilley's  regiment  wintered  at  Valley  Forge 
in  that  severe  season  of  1777-78,  and  under  Major 
Gilman  of  Plaistow  went  throuoh  the  hard-fou<rht 
battle  of  Monmouth,  and  received  Washington's 
special  praise  for  their  gallantry.  What  were  the 
perils  other  than  battle  in  this  war  can  be  learned 
as  well  from  Major  Gilman's  statement  in  1782  as 
from  any  other  source.  In  November  of  that  j^ear 
this  veteran,  now  a  lieutenant-colonel,  told  the  story 
of  his  hardships  in  a  petition  to  the  Exeter  legisla- 
ture. He  had  first  been  a  captain  in  Nixon's  Mas- 
sachusetts regiment  in  1775,  the  next  year  was 
made  a  captain  in  the  first  New  Hampshire  regi- 
ment (Cilley's),  and  in  April,  1777,  became  its 
major.    He  says  :  — 

"  After  the  5th  of  July  following,  being  the  time  of 
the  unhappy  retreat  from  Ticonderoga,  the  extreme  rain 


228  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

which  fell,  the  forced  marches,  want  of  proper  covering 
and  of  the  necessary  sustenance,  so  far  injured  his 
health  that  it  was  with  great  difficulty  that  he  ever  ar- 
rived at  Saratoga.  Which  was  productive  of  such  com- 
plicated hodily  disorders  as  hy  their  long  continuance 
since  have  wellnigh  ruined  his  constitution.  At  Saratoga 
he  consulted  a  physician  who  advised  that  he  should  he 
sent  out  of  camp.  Whereupon  Gen.  Poor  and  Col.  Cilley 
sent  him  down  to  Albany  ;  which  journey,  though  not 
more  than  half  a  day's  ride,  your  memorialist,  with 
great  fatigue  and  industry,  was  four  days  in  i)erfornnng. 
As  soon  as  he  reached  Albany  he  was  exercised  with  a 
severe  fever,  which  obliged  him  to  lie  bed-rid  for  several 
weeks.  The  20th  of  September,  1777,  he  had  the  addi- 
tional honor  of  being  appointed  Lt.  Colonel  of  Col.  Cll- 
ley's  regiment ;  but  just  as  he  was  beginning  to  recover 
a  little,  the  fever-ague  made  a  most  violent  assault  on  the 
feeble  and  shattered  body  of  your' memorialist;  which 
continued  its  outrages  with  very  little  remission  till  after 
the  army  had  marched  to  the  southward  ;  notwithstand- 
ing the  skill  and  attention  of  Dr.  Treat,  one  of  the 
Physicians-general,  who  attended  the  memorialist  and 
fed  him   with   Peruvian    Eark   by   wholesale.^    He    fre- 

1  Dr.  Matthew  Thornton,  a  phj-sician  himself,  being  inoculated 
for  the  smallpox  at  Philadelphia  in  November,  177(5,  a  year  and  a 
half  before  Major  Oilman.  p;ave  a  humorous  account  of  it  in  a  let- 
ter to  President  Weare.  '"  We  had  the  honor  to  be  attended  by 
Dr.  Cash,  Dr.  Surly,  Dr.  Critical  Observer,  Dr.  Gay  and  Dr.  Expe- 
rience. Between  the  hours  of  10  and  11  A.  M.  came  Dr.  Cash. 
'How  is 't,  Sip  and  Mad'm  ?  '  —  and  whatever  our  complaint.s 
were,  his  answer  was  '  All 's  pretty,'  and  vanished  in  a  second. 
He  was  the  operator,  and  for  a  few  days  visited  as  above  ;  and  we 
saw  no  more  of  him  till  1  paid  his  bill  of  .§18.  Dr.  Siu-ly  came 
two  or  three  times  each  day,  as  a  friend,  viewed  us  throug-h  his 


THE   REVOLUTION   AXD   ITS   SEQUEL     229 

quently  advised  him  to  endeavoi*  to  ride  homeward,  in 
hopes  the  change  of  air  might  assist  in  throwing  off  the 
fever-ague  ;  notwithstanding  which,  such  was  his  atten- 
tion to  his  duty  and  attachment  to  the  army,  that  he  set 
off  in  pursuit  of  the  army,  as  soon  as,  by  the  additional 
aid  of  the  cokl  weather,  his  disorders  were  so  far  miti- 
gated that  he  was  able  to  ride,  though  but  a  small  dis- 
tance in  a  day.  He  joined  the  regiment  and  proceeded 
to  Valley  Forge,  where  it  was  cantoned  for  the  winter. 
Col.  Cilley  and  Lt.  Col.  Reid  returning  home,  your  me- 
morialist had  the  honor  of  commanding  the  regiment 
that  winter,  to  the  entire  satisfaction  of  that  part  of  the 
army.  In  the  spring  of  1778  he  was  obliged  by  general 
orders  to  take  the  smallpox,  which  was  followed  by  the 
fevei'-ague,  and  wiiich  had  like  to  have  proved  fatal. 
However,  after  considerable  time  he  so  far  recovered 
his  health  that,  when  the  enemy  left  Philadelphia, 
he  was  able  to  pursue  them  with  the  regiment.  Col. 
Cilley  being  detached  with  Gen.  Lee,  your  memorialist 

glasses,  and  tlien,  with  a  smiling-  grin,  softly  said,  '  What !  no 
worse  yet  ?  this  is  but  trifling-  to  what  you  will  feel  before  all  is 
over.'  Dr.  Critical  Observer,  a  young-  doctor,  that  told  me  he 
-would  '  critically  observe  every  stage  of  the  smallpox  '  in  iis,  to 
gain  experience,  came  once  in  two  or  three  days,  and  stayed 
about  a  minute  each  time.  Dr.  Gay,  a  young  doctor,  that  came 
as  a  friend,  two  or  three  times  every  day,  tripped  round  and  sung 
a  tune  ;  and  told  us  '  all  would  end  well.'  Dr.  Experience,  a 
merchant  who  has  had  the  smallpox,  visited  us  every  day,  and 
gave  a  much  truer  account  of  the  disease  than  all  the  doctors." 

This  letter  is  dated  at  Baltimore,  whither  Congress  had  re- 
moved upon  news  of  General  Howe's  march  on  Philadelijhia,  and 
was  written  January  23,  1777,  in  Thornton's  usual  jocose  manner. 
He  was  born  in  Ireland,  and  had  the  temper  of  his  countrymen ; 
in  religion  a  heretic. 


230  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

had  the  honor  to  command  the  regiment  in  the  battle  of 
Monmouth,  and  the  further  honor  of  sharing,  with 
others,  tlie  favorable  ojjinion  his  Excellency  the  Com- 
mander-in-chief was  pleased  to  express  of  the  officers 
and  soldiers  on  that  occasion.  The  army  moved  to 
Wlilte  Plains,  and  thence  to  Hartford,  where  he  was 
taken  down  with  a  putrid  fever,  and  lay  despaired  of  by 
his  physician  for  more  tlian  three  months.  In  this  situa- 
tion he  applied  to  a  private  jihysician,  which  with  other 
incidental  charges  cost  him  some  hundreds  of  dollars ; 
for  which  he  never  received  a  farthing.  In  December, 
1778,  Gen.  Poor  and  Col.  Cilley  gave  him  leave  to  re- 
turn home  whenever  he  thought  himself  able  ;  who  with 
difficulty,  after  many  days,  with  great  expense,  arrived 
home,  having  been  absent  almost  two  years.  .  .  .  Con- 
tinuing in  so  ill  a  state  of  health,  he  despaired  of  ever 
being  able  to  serve  his  country  again,  and  it  was  painful 
to  him  to  stand  in  the  way  of  a  better  man,  that  could 
render  actual  service.  He  continued  to  solicit  a  dis- 
charge, and  at  length  obtained  one  from  Gen.  Washing- 
ton, bearing  date  March  24,  1780,  —  the  tenor  of  which 
cannot  operate  to  the  dishonor  of  your  memorialist." 

At  the  treason  of  Arnold  in  the  summer  of  1780, 
AVashington  had  another  opportunity  to  express 
his  confidence  in  the  soldiers  from  New  Hampshire, 
who  had  never  failed  liim  in  battle  or  in  camp. 
Captain  Webster,  of  the  New  Harai^shire  contin- 
gent, with  his  complexion  so  dark,  as  his  com- 
mander at  Bennington  said,  that  burnt  gunpowder 
could  not  change  it,  and  his  heart  "  borrowed  from 
a  lion,"  his  son  Daniel  said,  —  this  descendant  of 


THE   REVOLUTION   AND   ITS   SEQUEL     231 

the  aged  founder  of  Hampton  was  on  guard  the 
nio'ht  after  Arnold's  flioht  from  West  Point.  As 
Washington,  his  noble  mind  full  of  doubt  and 
anxiety,  not  knowing  who  might  fail  him  next,  saw 
the  swarthy  farmer  from  the  banks  of  the  Mer- 
rimac  at  his  post,  his  face  lighted  up,  runs  the 
legend,  and  he  said,  "  Ah,  Captain,  I  know  I  can 
trust  you,  and  your  men  from  New  Hampshire." 

Of  the  five  more  distinguished  New  Hampshire 
officers,  —  Stark,  Sullivan,  Cilley,  Poor,  and  Scam- 
mell,  —  the  last  two  died  in  the  service.  Poor  in 
New  Jersey  in  1779,  and  Scammell  in  the  final 
victory  at  Yorktown.  The  last  named  was  the  only 
college  graduate  among  the  high  officers,  and  a 
man  of  culture  and  great  promise,  only  a  dozen 
years  out  of  college  when  he  was  killed  in  battle. 
In  New  Hampshire  the  men  of  education  who  were 
not  clergymen  were  generally  either  neutral  or  on 
the  Tory  side.  Weare  was  an  exception,  and  there 
were  a  few  others.  In  Virginia  it  was  quite  oth- 
erwise, and  even  in  Connecticut ;  in  Massachu- 
setts the  college  graduates,  other  than  clergymen, 
were  about  equally  divided  between  the  two  par- 
ties. Joshua  Atherton,  a  Harvard  graduate  who 
settled  in  New  Hampshire  from  Massachusetts, 
was  at  first  a  Tory,  and  so  was  Rev.  Asa  Dunbar, 
the  maternal  grandfather  of  Henry  Thoreau,  and 
his  brothers-in-law,  the  sons  of  Colonel  Jones  of 
Weston.  Dunbar  gave  up  the  pulpit,  became  a 
lawyer,  and  practiced  in  Keene ;  his  brother-in-law, 


232  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

Daniel  Jones,  a  classmate  of  Scamraell  and  Chief 
Justice  Parsons  at  Harvard,  had  the  same  political 
experience.  The  cause  of  the  Kevolution  in  New 
Hampshire  was  upheld  chiefly  by  the  plain  people, 
and  those  who  had  made  their  own  way  in  the 
world,  without  much  aid  from  inherited  property 
or  special  culture. 

As  the  French  alliance  inclined  the  balance  of 
the  war  in  Washington's  favor,  the  New  Hampshire 
patriots  had  another  and  more  domestic  difficulty 
to  encounter.  The  "  New  Hampshire  Grants,"  as 
they  were  commonly  termed  (what  is  now  Ver- 
mont), were  generally  faithful  to  the  patriot  side, 
though  Stark  was  opposed  by  many  Vermont  To- 
ries, in  his  campaign  against  Burgoyne.  But  the 
people  west  of  the  Connecticut  River  wished  to  be 
independent  both  of  New  York  and  New  Hamp- 
shire, as  ultimately  they  became  ;  and  in  the  years 
from  1778  to  1782  they  found  friends  on  the  east 
of  the  boundary  river  who  sought  to  unite  with 
them,  and  take  from  New  Hampshire  a  large  strip 
of  her  territory,  which  the  royal  decisions  in  1741 
and  1764  had  assigned  to  the  Province  of  the 
Wentworths.  That  powerful  family  had  lost  its 
preeminence,  but  the  new  State  did  not  mean  to 
renounce  what  had  been  properly  granted.  Presi- 
dent Weare  and  his  council  therefore  made  a  claim 
to  all  Vermont,  as  against  New  York,  and  to  all 
east  of  the  Connecticut,  as  against  the  revolted 
towns  in  the  valley. 


THE   REVOLUTION   AND   ITS  SEQUEL      233 

As  the  controversy  grew  warm,  double  taxes 
were  laid  by  the  two  legislatures  claiming  control, 
and  some  arrests  were  made.  The  prospect  of 
armed  resistance  from  Vermont,  or  even  of  an  alli- 
ance between  its  peo})le  and  the  British  in  Canada, 
caused  Washington,  Weare,  and  the  patriots  gen- 
erally much  anxiety.  Dr.  Thornton,  writing  to 
Weare  in  late  December,  1781,  and  lamenting  the 
death  of  Scammell,^  was  even  more  sorrowful  for 
the  threatened  contest  in  Vermont.    He  said  :  — 

"  The  Vermont  affair  grieves  me  more  than  our  war 
with  Great  Britain.  How  much  ought  Christians  to  shud- 
der at  the  very  thought  of  brother  kilhng  brother  about 
a  line  of  jurisdiction  !  For  mercy's  sake,  Sir,  if  possible, 
prevent  every  hostile  measure  until  the  Continental  Con- 
gress explicitly  fixes  the  bounds,  and  informs  New  Hamp- 
shire how  to  conduct.  From  the  best  information,  a  very 
great  majority,  on  both  sides  the  river,  will  acquiesce  in 
the  determination  of  Congress.  If  so,  and  we  wait,  all 
will  be  peace.  .  .  .  Pray,  Sir,  excuse  this  trouble.  It 
does  not  come  to  dictate,  but  to  ease  my  mind,  anxious 
for  the  peace  and  happiness  of  mankind." 

Notwithstanding  this  appeal,  Weare,  Sullivan, 
and    the    New   Hampshire    authorities^'llTF^nerat" 

^  Dr.  Thornton,  who  seems  to  have  turned  a  verse  now  and 
then,  inclosed  in  this  letter  to  the  head  of  his  State  some  lines  in 
the  customary  measure  of  Pope  and  Johnson,  for  commemoration 
of  Colonel  Scammell,  among  which  were  these  :  — 

"  Such  spotless  lioiior,  such  ingenuous  truth, 
Such  ripened  wisdom  in  the  bloom  of  youth, 
So  mild,  so  gentle,  so  composed  a  mind. 
To  such  heroic  warmth  and  courage  joined,"  etc. 


234  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

went  forward  with  their  plan  for  putting  down  by 
force  turbulence  in  the  Connecticut  valley  towns, 
and  it  was  voted  to  send  a  thousand  men  under 
Sullivan,  to  support  the  majesty  of  the  law.  As 
usual,  the  influence  of  Washington  was  called  in, 
and  a  temperate  and  reasonable  letter  from  him  to 
Governor  Chittenden,  of  the  unrecognized  State  of 
Vermont,  led  to  the  acceptance,  by  Vermont,  of  the 
comjjromise  adopted  in  Congress,  —  the  eastern 
towns  to  be  restored  to  the  jurisdiction  of  New 
Hampshire,  and  the  claim  of  the  Vermonters  to  the 
rest  of  the  grants  to  be  recognized,  as  against  the 
conflicting  claims  of  New  York  and  New  Hamp- 
shire. Vermont  yielded  to  this  compromise  Febru- 
ary 23,  1782,  and  the  revolted  towns  (which  were 
said  to  have  acted  under  some  instigation  from  the 
new  college  of  Dartmouth,  at  Hanover)  gradually 
returned  to  their  dut}^  Nine  years  after,  Vermont 
was  admitted  to  the  Union  as  a  State,  in  Feb- 
ruary, 1791.  Stark,  who  had  no  less  prudence  in 
civil  affairs  than  skill  in  war,  wrote  to  Governor 
Chittenden  congratulating  him  on  the  "  happy  de- 
termination of  Congress."    He  said  :  — 

"In  my  opinion  nothing  can  wound  a  generous  mind 
more  than  the  mortifying  thought  of  making  a  large 
country  miserable  ;  and  the  people  of  Vermont,  by  their 
utter  detestation  of  the  management  of  New  York,  must 
have  been  wretched  under  their  government.  To  have 
been  connected  with  New  Hampshire  .  .  .  would  have 
been  very  inconvenient  and  expensive  for  both  bodies  of 


THE  REVOLUTION   AND   ITS   SEQUEL     235 

people,  and  no  real  good  resulting  from  such  a  con- 
nection ;  therefore  every  man  wlio  consulted  the  public 
interest  must  be  an  advocate  for  a  separation.  For 
had  they  been  connected,  there  would  ever  have  been  a 
jealousy  between  the  two  States,  infallibly  dangerous  to 
both  ;  but  that  jealousy,  by  the  separation,  must  entirely 
subside,  and  New  Hampshire  and  Vermont  live  in  per- 
fect friendship  as  sister  States." 

As  the  man  who  had  saved  Vermont  from 
subjugation,  his  opinion  should  have  had  weight 
with  the  people  there,  and  doubtless  it  did.  Nor  is 
it  apparent  that  Weare,  who  had  much  of  the  calm 
decision  of  Stark,  ever  desired  more  than  to  pre- 
vent the  dismemberment  of  his  own  State ;  for  he 
and  Sullivan,  then  in  Congress,  yielded  at  once  to 
the  compromise  that  Washington  suggested.  Sulli- 
van, with  his  mercurial  temperament  and  turn  for 
accepting  the  first  propositions  that  came  up.  com- 
monly needed  the  restraining  judgment  of  Weare, 
of  Washington,  or  of  some  cooler  head ;  but  his 
acute  perceptions  often  inspired  the  coi-rect  policy 
finally  adopted.  A  signal  instance  of  this  was  his 
pointing  out  to  Washington  in  1780  that  the  best 
man  to  be  finance  minister  of  the  Confederacy,  to 
which  post  Robert  Morris  was  soon  appointed, 
would  be  young  Alexander  Hamilton.  For  the 
emergency,  then,  Morris  was  the  best  man  ;  but  Sul- 
livan had  rightly  divined  the  genius  of  Hamilton, 
who  took  up  the  burden  after  it  proved  too  heavy 
for  even  the  hopeful  and  accomplished  merchant. 


236  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

New  Hampshire  was  pecuniarily  unable  to  re- 
spond to  the  demands  of  the  Confederacy  in  mat- 
ters of  taxation  ;  her  quota  of  money  was  hopelessly 
in  arrears  when  Morris"  came  to  the  Treasury.  But 
so  ready  and  serviceable  was  her  quota  of  men, 
and  so  indispensable  her  service  in  the  Burgoyne 
campaign,  that  this  delinquency  in  taxes  was  over- 
looked. Her  officers  and  soldiers  came  out  of  the 
war  poor,  and  the  Societ}''  of  the  Cincinnati,  headed 
by  Sullivan,  had  but  few  contributing  members 
in  the  impoverished  State.  Stark  was  averse  to 
any  perpetuation  by  heredity  of  the  distinction 
between  officers  and  men,  and  Washington  finally 
withdrew  from  its  presidency  for  something  like 
the  same  reason.  A  New  Hampshire  branch  of  the 
Cincinnati  still  exists,  with  an  honorable  record, 
and  so  do  two  other  hereditary  organizations,  per- 
petuating the  memory  of  the  share  which  the  little 
State  had  in  the  world-renowned  Revolution. 

Great  was  the  loss  in  life,  in  trade,  in  social 
morality,  and  general  civilization  among  the  people 
of  New  Hampshire  during  the  war.  In  1780  the 
authorities  of  Portsmouth  reported  that,  of  12,000 
tons  of  shipping  owned  at  that  port  before  1775, 
only  500  tons  remained  ;  while  all  the  expenses  of 
government,  especially  those  for  the  care  of  the 
public  poor,  had  much  increased.  Privateering  and 
the  supply  of  the  American  army  had  done  some- 
thing to  offset  this  loss  of  trade  ;  but  the  people 
generally  were   poor,  and  taxation  pressed  hard 


THE   REVOLUTION   AND   ITS   SEQUEL     237 

upon  all  classes  ;  while  the  long  siu-feit  of  fiat 
money  had  accustomed  the  unthinking,  particularly 
those  who  had  engaged  in  speculation,  to  the  delu- 
sion that  paper  money,  with  laws  against  the  speedy 
collection  of  debts,  would  relieve  their  embarrass- 
ments. In  New  Hampshire,  then,  as  afterwards  in 
Massachusetts,  the  poor  were  encouraged  by  some 
former  leaders  to  take  up  arms  in  support  of 
the  demand  for  stay -laws  and  unsound  financial 
measures.  Although  the  New  Hampshire  Consti- 
tution of  1783  had  given  general  satisfaction,  and 
there  was  no  such  uneasiness  about  the  framework 
of  government  as  in  Pennsylvania  and  some  other 
States,  the  movement  against  lawyers,  courts,  and 
money-lenders,  in  the  older  counties  of  Rocking- 
ham and  Strafford,  became  threatening  in  the  sum- 
mer of  1786, — headed,  it  is  alleged,  by  General 
Nathaniel  Peabody  of  Atkinson,  who  had  been  in 
Congress,  and  by  General  Moulton  of  Hampton, 
—  men  claiming  to  be  wealthy,  but  now  heavily 
bui-dened  with  debt.  Finally,  on  the  lOtli  of  Sep- 
tember, a  body  of  armed  men,  headed  by  officers  in 
the  Revolution,  came  marching  down  from  London- 
derry, Pembroke,  and  other  towns  north  of  Exeter, 
to  present  petitions,  backed  by  force,  in  favor  of 
issuing  paper  money  in  amount  equal  to  the  large 
state  debt,  and  of  making  this  paper  a  legal  tender, 
with  other  measures  of  the  sort.  They  reached 
Exeter  towards  evening  on  the  20th,  surrounded 
the  larjre  church  where  the  legislature  was  in  ses- 


238  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

sion,  and  sought  to  overawe  the  members  and  the 
])resident,  who  happened  to  be  General  Sullivan. 
Whatever  his  defects,  Sullivan  was  not  to  be 
frightened  or  coerced ;  he  parleyed  with  the  insur- 
gents, but  only  long  enough  to  place  himself  at 
liberty,  and  summon  his  forces.  That  night,  under 
special  authority  from  the  two  Houses,  he  issued 
orders  for  all  the  militia  officers  accessible  to  re- 
port at  Exeter  the  next  morning,  with  their  com- 
mands under  arms.  The  orders  were  carried  over 
the  county  by  night,  and  the  next  morning  there 
had  rallied  at  Exeter  a  force  between  fifteen  hun- 
dred and  two  thousand  in  number,  well  armed,  and 
commanded  by  the  officers  who  had  led  them  to 
battle  against  England.  Major-General  Cilley,  from 
the  hills  of  Nottingham,  took  command  under  Presi- 
dent Sullivan,  and  a  considerable  number  of  volun- 
teers, under  Nicholas  Oilman,  put  themselves  at 
Cilley's  orders,  among  them  William  Plumer  of 
Epj:)ing  and  the  irascible  Benjamin  Adams  of  New- 
iugton.  By  noon  on  the  21st,  the  insurgents  were 
driven  off,  their  leaders  captured  without  bloodshed, 
and  the  revolt  was  at  an  end.  It  required  a  cam- 
paign of  months  in  Massachusetts  to  do  what  Sulli- 
van, Cilley,  the  Gilinans,  and  Plumer,  afterward 
senator  in  Congress  and  Governor,  accomplished 
in  twenty-four  hours. 

Two  years  later,  when  the  Federal  Constitution 
of  1787  was  offei-ed  for  ratification  in  New  Hamp- 
shire, a  longer  effort  was  necessary  to  establish  a 


THE   REVOLUTION   AND   ITS   SEQUEL     239 

good  national  government  with  the  consent  of  the 
little  State.  It  was  done  by  the  same  men  who  had 
come  to  the  support  of  Sullivan  in  1786,  aided 
by  many  others,  then  too  far  from  the  seat  of  gov- 
ernment to  take  part  in  the  Exeter  affair.  As  in 
other  States,  there  was  in  New  Hampshire  a  feeling 
that  the  new  Constitution  placejd_iPQ  much  power 
in  the  central  government.  That  view,  indeed,  was 
taken  by  John  Quincy  Adams,  then  a  law  student 
at  Newburyport,  who  drove  across  the  country  ten 
miles  to  Exeter,  to  hear  the  debates  in  the  i\itify- 
ing  convention.  But  the  better  opinion  of  the  Lang- 
dons  (John,  Woodbury,  and  Samuel),  of  Sullivan, 
the  Gilmans,  Plumer,  etc.,  prevailed,  after  an  ad- 
journment of  some  weeks  to  allow  the  delegates  to 
consult  their  constituents.  The  final  and  conclusive 
speech  seems  tcJ  have  been  made  by  Captain  Web- 
ster of'  Salisbury,  —  the  same  who  had  stood  guard 
for  Washington  at  West  Point.  It  was  brief,  and 
this  was  its  main  argument :  "  I  have  followed  the 
lead  of  General  Washington  through  seven  years  of 
war ;  he  never  misled  us.  His  name  is  subscribed 
to  this  Constitution.  He  will  not  mislead  us  now. 
I  shall  vote  for  its  adoption."  It  was  ratified  by 
New  Hampshire  in  June,  1788,  and  its  wise  pro- 
visions, enforced  by  the  statesmanship  of  Wash- 
ington, soon  changed  the  condition  of  New  Hamp- 
shire into  one  of  prosperity,  and  commanded  the 
full  support  of  its  citizens,  whatever  their  doubts 
may  have  been. 


CHAPTER  X 

SOCIAL   AND   POLITICAL    DEVELOPMENT   IN   THE 
NINETEENTH   CENTURY 

Like  the  rest  of  the  new  nation,  New  Hampshire, 
after  the  formation  of  a  more  perfect  union  under 
Washington  and  the  Constitution  of  1787,  went 
on  increasing  its  inhabitants  and  their  material 
prosperity  by  leaps  and  bounds.  In  the  ten  years 
(1790-1800)  the  little  agricultural  State  gained  in 
jiopulation  nearly  thirty  per  cent.,  and  at  the  open- 
ing of  the  nineteenth  century  had  about  184,000 
people.  In  the  next  decade  the  gain  was  little  more 
than  half  as  fast,  yet  enough  to  double  its  popu- 
lation in  sixty  years.  But  in  spite  of  the  intro- 
duction of  manufactures,  chiefly  textile,  this  rate 
was  not  kept  up,  and  it  was  not  until  1887  that 
the  population  of  1800  had  really  doubled.  At  the 
end  of  the  century  it  was  412.000,  and  of  late  has 
been  gaining  at  the  rate  of  nine  per  cent,  in  ten 
years.  During  the  Civil  War  there  was  an  actual 
decrease  of  inhabitants,  from  32G,073  in  1860  to 
318,300  in  1870.  But  the  prevailing  check  to  a 
<2^ain  so  large  as  from  1790  to  1810  was  the  constant 
stream  of  emigration  flowing  from  New  Hampshire 


SOCIAL  AND   POLITICAL   DEVELOPMENT    241 

to  the  new  lands  of  New  York,  Ohio,  and  farther 
west,  and  from  the  rural  towns  to  the  cities  of  south- 
ern New  England.  As  those  new  lands  became 
settled  for  cultivation,  and  gained  the  means  of 
sending  their  products  eastward,  the  good  markets 
of  the  New  Hampshire  farmers  and  foresters  were 
gradually  lost,  in  the  greater  cheapness  of  western 
production ;  and  the  near  local  markets  could  not 
take  enough  of  the  products  of  gardening  and  dai- 
ries to  make  farming  in  general  a  profitable  indus- 
try. The  introduction  of  cotton  and  woolen  mills 
for  a  time  favored  the  farmers  by  giving  them  a 
home  market ;  but  of  late  even  manufactures  have 
been  deserting  many  of  the  mill-streams  of  the  hill- 
region,  to  concentrate  in  cities  near  the  seaboard. 
A  new  industry  of  much  importance  has  sprung 
lip  within  fifty  years,  and  is  now  very  important, 
—  that  of  caring  for  thousands  of  visitors  who 
frequent  the  mountain  and  seashore  resorts  for  a 
few  months  in  the  warm  season.  Coincident  with 
these  changes  there  has  been  a  concentration  of 
industrial  employment  in  manufacturing  cities  like 
Manchester  and  Nashua,  accompanied  by  a  large 
immigration  of  Irish,  English,  Canadian  French, 
and  other  foreign  operatives,  who  now  swell  the 
census  by  many  thousands. 

Amid  all  these  changes  the  educational,  political, 
and  social  development  of  the  people  went  forward 
with  the  early  increase  of  inhabitants,  and  was  not 
checked  materially  as  the  population  became  more 


242  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

nearl}''  station aiy.  Two  early  and  useful  educational 
foundations  distinguished  the  Kevolutionary  period, 
—  Dartmouth  College,  founded  under  John  Went- 
worth's  government,  just  before  the  outbreak,  and 
the  Phillips  Exeter  Academy,  opened  at  the  new 
state  capital  before  the  war  had  fairly  closed.  Until 
then  the  higher  education  of  New  Hampshire  boys 
was  carried  on  in  minister's  families,  or  at  Har- 
vard College,  although  the  common  schools  did  some- 
times give  instruction  in  Greek,  Latin,  and  French. 
The  location  of  Dartmouth  in  the  town  of  Han- 
over made  it  accessible  to  the  youth  of  two  or  three 
States,  who  were  attracted  by  the  cheapness  of  liv- 
ing and  the  reputation  for  scholarship  which  the 
college  soon  acquired  ;  while  the  Exeter  Academy, 
under  a  noteworthy  instructor,  Dr.  Benjamin  Abbot, 
early  drew  classical  students  from  all  New  England 
and  the  more  distant  States.  Washington  testified 
his  regard  for  New  Hampshire,  wdiose  soldiers  he 
had  learned  to  value  in  the  long  war,  by  sending 
two  of  his  nephews  to  be  educated  by  Dr.  Abbot ; 
the  rich  merchants  and  pi'ofessional  men  of  Maine 
and  Massachusetts  followed  the  example,  and  sent 
their  sons  to  Exeter.  A  school  so  successful  stimu- 
lated other  towns,  and  before  1840  there  were  many 
"academies"  in  all  parts  of  New  Hampshire,  which 
supplied  the  place  of  public  high  schools,  not  yet 
established.  These,  with  the  general  excellence  of 
the  short  but  energetic  summer  and  winter  com- 
mon schools,  raised  the  standard  of  general  intel- 


SOCIAL  AND   POLITICAL  DEVELOPMENT    243 

ligence  in  the  State,  and  fitted  the  youth,  as  they 
came  forward,  to  take  an  active  share  in  political 
government,  for  which  the  universal  "town  meet- 
ing "  was  itself  a  school  of  practice,  as  the  courts 
of  local  and  county  justices  were  schools  of  every- 
day law. 

New  Hampshire  was  fortunate  in  its  charter  of 
constitutional  government,  and  has  never  grown 
too  populous  to  derive  the  best  advantage  from  it. 
So  well  satisfied  were  the  people,  during  the  whole 
Revolution,  with  the  simple  forms  of  government 
adopted  iu  1775,  and  with  the  men  who  adminis- 
tered them,  that  they  successively  rejected  three 
elaborate  Constitutions  offered  them  in  1778, 1779, 
and  1781,  and  finally  adopted  in  1783  a  form  largely 
based  on  John  Adams's  draft  for  Massachusetts, 
but  with  certain  changes  in  favor  of  more  religious 
liberty  than  the  Massachusetts  Puritans  were  yet 
ready  to  allow.  After  providing  for  public  worship 
at  the  expense  of  towns,  parishes,  and  religious  cor- 
porations, the  Constitution  of  1783  went  on  :  — 

"  Provided,  notwithstanding,  that  the  several  towns, 
parishes,  bodies  corporate  or  religious  societies  shall  at 
all  times  have  the  exclusive  right  of  electing  their  own 
public  teachers,  and  of  contracting  with  them  for  their 
support  and  maintenance.  And  no  person  of  any  one 
particular  religious  sect  or  denomination  shall  ever  be 
compelled  to  pay  towards  the  support  of  the  teachers 
of  another  persuasion,  sect  or  denomination.  And  every 
denomination  of  Christians  demeaning  themselves  quietly, 


244  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

and  as  good  subjects  of  the  State,  shall  be  equally  under 
the  protection  of  the  law  ;  and  no  subordination  of  any 
one  sect  or  denomination  to  another  shall  ever  be  estab- 
lished by  law." 

This  Constitution  in  substance  was  continued  in 
1792,  the  title  of  president  being  changed  to  gov- 
ernor; remained  without  alteration  for  sixty  years, 
till  1852,  and  has  been  but  slightly  changed  (chiefly 
in  respect  to  representation  of  towns  in  the  legis- 
lature, and  the  number  of  senators  and  representa- 
tives), in  the  hundred  and  twenty  years  since  its 
first  adoption.  Indeed,  the  number  of  councilors/ 
to  advise  the  governor,  originally  fixed  at  five, 
when  there  were  but  five  counties,  remains  the  same 
now,  when  there  are  ten  counties.  The  Senate,  ori* 
ginally  numbering  twelve,  or  one  for  every  10,000 
people,  is  now  twenty-four,  or  one  for  every  35,000. 
But  the  growth  of  the  House  of  Representatives, 
under  the  first  provisions,  has  been  so  great  as 
to  make  the  surplus  cumbersome,  and  it  has  been 
twice  reduced.  Each  House  has  a  veto  on  the  other, 
and  the  Council  has  a  veto  on  appointments  by  the 
governor,  as  in  Massachusetts.  Practically  no  harm 
has  resulted  from  these  vetoes ;  indeed,  the  execu- 
tive and  legislative  branches  have  virtually  been 
in  accoi'd,  with  annual  or  biennial  elections,  nine 
tenths  of  the  time.  No  revolution  or  threat  of  revo- 
lution has  occurred  since  the  refractory  towns  east 
of  the  Connecticut  submitted  to  the  mild  wisdom  of 
Weare  and  the  counsels  of  Sullivan  and  Stark,  for 


SOCIAL   AND  POLITICAL   DEVELOPMENT    245 

the  rising  of  1786  aimed  ouly  at  the  enactment  of  a,^_ 
few  special  laws.  During  this  century  and  a  quar- 
ter, France  has  set  up  and  overthrown  a  dozen  con- 
stitutions, and  England  has  modified  its  imperish- 
able constitution  three  or  four  times.  In  fact,  the 
New  Hampshire  people  have  shown  a  steadiness 
of  political  temper  which  quite  verifies  their  Brit- 
ish origin.  During  their  Revolution,  though  a  few 
Tories  were  imprisoned  and  a  few  estates  confis- 
cated, no  man  was  put  to  death  for  treason.  =^ 

The  growth  of  aristocratic  feeling,  so  noticeable 
at  Portsmouth  in  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury, was  checked  by  the  Revolution,  and  did  not 
revive  in  New  Hampshire  for  many  years,  although 
the  party  called  Federal  cherished  opinions  dis- 
tinctly oligarchical,  which  seem  to  have  been  shai"ed 
by  a  few  of  the  leading  Federalists  in  different 
parts  of  New  Hampshire,  particularly  in  Exeter. 
The  power  once  centred  at  Portsmouth  in  a  few 
families  was  transferred  to  Exeter  with  the  Revo- 
lutionary government,  and  a  circle  of  political  mag- 
-nates,  among  whom  members  of  the  Gilman  family 
were  prominent,  at  times  controlled  the  later  poli- 
tics of  the  State.  But  the  questions  at  issue  for  a 
few  years  after  the  death  of  President  Weare  in 
1785  were  chiefly  personal  or  local ;  and  it  was  not 
until  the  treaty  with  England  made  by  Washington 
(Jay's  treaty)  that  party  lines  began  to  be  drawn 
between  the  Republicans,  under  John  Langdon  and  - 
General  Stark,  with  other  Revolutionary  patriots, 


24G  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

and  the  Federalists,  led  by  the  Gilmans  and  Jere- 
miah Smith  of  Exeter,  with  whom  were  associated 
William  Plumer  of  Epping,  Charles  Atherton  of 
Amherst,  and  a  few  lawyers  in  the  Connecticut 
valley.  General  Sullivan  and  Dr.  Bartlett,  the  im- 
mediate successors  of  Weare,  with  the  title  of  pre- 
sident, could  hardly  be  ranked  in  either  party; 
nor  could  "Washington  until  after  their  death.  In 
the  contention  between  Jefferson  and  Hamilton, 
in  Washington's  cabinet,  Langdon,  then  in  the 
national  Senate,  sided  with  Jefferson,  and  his  col- 
leagues, Samuel  Livermore  and  Paine  Wingate, 
with  Hamilton.  For  eleven  years,  from  1794  to 
1805,  John  Taylor  Oilman  of  Exeter,  a  large  land-  \ 
holder  and  popular  gentleman,  was  chosen  gov-_^ 
eruor  annually,  but  from  1802  with  decreasing 
majorities  over  Langdon,  who,  in  1805,  aided  by 
the  secession  of  John  Quincy  Adams  and  William 
Plumer  from  the  Federalists  (whom  they  called 
disunionists),  defeated  Gilman  by  a  vote  of  16,000 
to  12,287,  and  for  four  years  ruled  as  governor. 
In  1809  Judge  Smith  defeated  Langdon  by  a  few 
hundred  votes,  but  was  himself  defeated  by  Lang- 
don the  next  two  years,  and  Langdon  was  suc- 
ceeded by  his  recent  party  associate,  Plumer,  in 
1812.  But  the  war  with  England,  which  injured 
the  growing  trade  of  New  Hamjishire,  already  much 
damaged  by  Jefferson's  Embargo,  threw  the  State 
again  into  the  hands  of  the  Federalists,  and  Gil- 
man   was  reelected  in  the   three  years   1813-15. 


SOCIAL   AND   POLITICAL   DEVELOPMENT    247 

Plumer  defeated  Sheafe  in  1816,  and  was  governor 
for  the  next  three  years,  when  party  strife  had 
much  abated  under  the  fortunate  administration  of 
President  Monroe.  No  governor  since  Benning 
Wentworth  had  so  many  years  of  administration 
as  Gilman,  who  was  elected  fourteen  years,  and 
only  twice  defeated.  This  success  he  owed  not  so 
much  to  his  part}',  which  was  usuall}^  beaten  with 
any  other  candidate,  as  to  his  own  geniality,  public 
services,  and  ornamental  qualities ;  for  the  New 
Hampshire  voters  (other  things  being  equal)  com- 
monly preferred  the  handsomer  of  two  candidates. 
On  this  ground  John  Langdon  had  equal  claims 
with  Gilman,  till  age  had  tarnished  a  little  the 
lustre  of  his  good  looks.  It  was  during  this  Federal 
ascendancy  in  the  State  that  the  shining  abilities 
of  Daniel  Webster  brought  him  forward  ;  he  was 
chosen  to  Congress  in  1813  from  the  Rockingham 
district,  and  served  the  four  years,  1813-17.  His 
manly  eloquence  was  first  exliibited  at  Washington 
in  opposing  the  administration  of  Madison  and  the 
war  with  England  ;  his  antagonists  being  Calhoun 
and  Clay,  with  whom  for  more  than  thirty  years 
afterward  he  was  either  in  conjunction  or  opposi- 
tion, —  seldom  carrj'ing  his  measures,  but  always 
superior  in  oratory. 

Meantime,  whether  in  peace  or  war.  New  Hamp- 
shire continued  to  flourish,  under  governors  who 
were  always  sensible  and  patriotic,  and  often 
accomplished    statesmen,    like   Langdon,    Plumer, 


248  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

Samuel  Bell,  and  Woodbury.  In  1823,  when 
Woodbur}',  who  had  been  an  excellent  judge, 
and  was  soon  to  be  senator  in  Congress,  served  his 
one  year  as  governor,  he  jDresented  the  striking- 
facts  of  his  State's  prosjDerity  in  an  address  to  the 
legislature,  then  composed  of  12  senators  and  201 
assemblymen.^  He  declared  that  New  Hampshire, 
with  less  than  250,000  people,  raised  in  1822  a 
school-tax  of  #90,000  for  the  support  of  free  schools, 
in  which,  he  said,  "  the  affluent  of  both  sexes  ac- 
quire the  elements  of  knowledge,  and  nearly  all  the 
poor  and  middling  classes  begin  and  complete  their 
education."  He  computed  the  exports  for  1822 
from  the  only  seaport,  Portsmouth,  at  $140,000, 
and  the  whole  farm  and  forest  product  exported  at 
very  near  $1,000,000.  Thirty  years  before,  he  said, 
the  exports  were  less  than  a  quarter  part  as  much. 
The  ten  state  banks  had  a  capital  of  more  than 
$1,000,000,  and  at  the  session  of  1822,  manufactur- 
ing companies  had  been  chartered  with  a  nominal 
capital  of  $5,000,000.  This  indicated  that  manu- 
factures were  thought  to  be  more  profitable  than 
agriculture  or  commerce  ;  and  they  continued  to 
develop  steadily  for  half  a  century  after  this.  But 
in  the  decade  1840-50,  railroad  building  and  man- 

^  In  1784  there  were  but  90  members  of  this  lower  House  ;  in 
1800, 140  ;  in  1810,  178 ;  the  increase  being  wholly  due  to  a  gain  in 
population  even  larger.  The  633  slaves  who  figured  among  the 
52,000  inhabitants  of  1707,  and  of  whom  158  remained  in  17U0, 
were  now  all  freemen,  if  alive.  They  had  petitioned  for  freedom 
in  1777. 


SOCIAL  AND   POLITICAL   DEVELOPMENT     249 

agement  was  an  interest  of  importance,  and  has 
now  become  pei-liaps  the  greatest  single  interest 
affecting:  leoislation  and  the  convenience  of  the 
people.  The  year  1822,  selected  as  about  midway 
between  the  close  of  the  impoverishing  Revolu- 
tionary War  and  the  opening  of  the  great  Civil 
"War,  showed  a  valuation  of  real  and  personal 
property  for  taxation  of  only  -150,000,000  for  a 
population  of  250,000,  or  $200  ^^er  capita.  The 
valuation  for  a  like  purpose  of  taxation  in  1902, 
seventy  years  later,  was  $213,000,000,  or  $507  per 
capita  for  an  estimated  number  of  420,000  people. 
But  the  taxes,  which  in  1822  were  but  about 
$250,000,  or  $1  for  each  inhabitant,  had  by  1902 
become  $1,212,000.  or  $10  for  each  inhabitant,  in 
addition  to  the  national  taxes,  which  fell  on  New 
Hampshire  at  the  rate  of  at  least  $6  for  eacli 
inhabitant.  The  ability  to  pay  these  taxes,  and  yet 
to  increase  steadily  in  aggregate  wealth,  makes  it 
needless  to  say  that  the  State  is  still  prosperous, 
thouah  not  one  of  those  where  enormous  fortunes 
are  accumulated  through  tariff  laws  or  the  evasion 
of  public  burdens. 

The  period  just  reviewed,  from  1790  to  1823, 
was  that  in  which  the  older  national  parties  in 
politics  contended  (at  first  mildly,  and  then  hotly) 
for  the  control  of  the  State.  On  the  whole,  the 
advantage  was  with  the  Federalists,  who  also  were, 
on  the  whole,  the  representatives  of  the  wealth  and 
culture  of  New  Hampshire.    But  the  ardent  pa- 


230  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

triotism  of  the  people,  which  was  apt  to  show  itself 
in  animosity  against  England  (for  which  country 
the  Federalists  were  generally  apologizing  or  enthu- 
siastic), gradually  brought  New  Hampshire  over  to 
the  Republican  side,  —  termed  "  Democratic  "  in 
disparagement,  by  its  opponents;  The  war  with 
England  in  1812  contributed  largely  to  this  politi- 
cal change,  especially  after  the  barbarous  attack 
on  the  national  Capital  in  1814,  and  the  crushing 
defeat  of  Wellington's  tried  veterans  by  Jackson 
and  his  western  riflemen  at  New  Orleans.  The 
Hartford  Convention  of  1814-15,  which  really 
aimed  at  a  separate  confederacy  at  the  North,  if 
the  domination  of  Virginia,  Carolina,  and  Ken- 
tucky in  the  existing  Union  could  not  be  thrown 
oft',  got  no  state  sanction  from  New  HamjDshire, 
so  close  had  become  the  contest  of  parties  there. 
And  when  Jackson's  victory  gave  a  lustre  to  the 
Treaty  of  Ghent  which  its  unfruitful  conditions 
hardly  deserved,  the  defeat  of  the  Federalists  was 
assured.  Governor  Plumer,  the  close  friend  for 
years  of  John  Quincy  Adams,  who  had  furnished 
him  in  1805  with  conclusive  evidence  of  the  dis- 
union designs  of  many  leading  New  England  Fed- 
eralists (scarcely  held  in  check  by  the  wiser  Hamil- 
ton), was  elected  governor  in  181G  over  the  popular 
Gilman's  successor,  Sheafe,  a  rich  Portsmouth  mer- 
chant ;  and  New  Hampshire  gave  her  presidential 
vote  for  Monroe  of  Virginia,  by  nearly  two  thou- 
sand majority  over  Eufus  King,  the  Federalist.    In 


SOCIAL   AND   POLITICAL   DEVELOPMENT    251 

the  next  election  Monroe,  who  had  made  Adams 
his  Secretary  of  State,  received  nearly  nine  tenths 
of  the  small  vote ;  but  Pluraer,  then  an  elector, 
cast  his  ballot  for  Adams  as  President  and  Richard 
Rush  Vice-President.  Samuel  Bell,  who  succeeded 
Plumer  as  Governor  in  1819,  and  was  of  the  same 
party,  was  twice  reelected  almost  unanimously. 
Woodbury,  who  succeeded  liim  in  1823,  was  also  a 
Republican,  and,  though  defeated  the  next  year  by 
a  popular  clergyman,  on  an  issue  partly  religious, 
was  chosen  senator  the  year  he  was  defeated  as 
Governor,  and  became  a  supporter  of  Andrew 
Jackson  while  in  Congress. 

William  Plumer,  as  Governor,  distinguished  his 
administration  by  an  effort  to  reorganize  Dart- 
mouth College  as  a  State  University,  after  the 
model  of  Jefferson's  University  of  Virginia.  This 
effort  originated  in  a  quarrel  among  the  Federalist 
trustees  of  the  little  college,  who  disagi'eed  with 
John  Wheelock,  son  of  the  nominal  founder,  and 
eventually  removed  him  from  the  presidency,  in  a 
fit  of  anger.  Against  this  the  sagacious  Mason 
(New  Hampshire's  ablest  lawyer,  among  many 
of  high  rank)  advised  in  vain.  Plumer  as  Gov- 
ernor took  up  the  cause  of  Wlieelock,  who,  like 
Plumer,  had  left  the  Federalists  for  the  Republi- 
cans, and  submitted  to  the  legislature  in  June,  1817, 
a  wise  plan  for  changing  a  narrow  sectarian  sem- 
inary into  a  broad  university.  His  measure  was 
adopted,  and  only  resisted  in  the  courts,  at  first 


252  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

of  New  Hampshire,  and  finally  of  the  United 
States,  where  Marshall,  early  in  1819,  gave  his 
famous,  but  of  late  very  troublesome,  decision 
against  PI  inner. 

The  Dartmouth  College  decision  may  be  con- 
sidered as  good  or  bad  law,  or  as  good  or  bad  pub- 
lic policy  ;  and  it  is  not  so  customary  now  to  call  it 
good  policy  as  it  was  at  the  time  it  became  good 
law,  by  the  decision  of  Marshall  and  Story.  But 
whether  good  or  bad  policy  for  the  country  at  large, 
it  seems  to  have  delayed  for  half  a  century  that 
cordial  interest  of  the  State  in  the  afPairs  of  its  sole 
college,  which  it  was  the  intention  of  Plumer  and 
his  friends  to  promote.  It  became  a  subject  of 
warm  political  debate,  and  was  one  of  the  many 
causes  which  held  New  Hampshire  for  years  firmly 
in  the  political  party  hostile  to  Marshall  and  Story. 
The  decision  of  Marshall  was  opposed  to  a  careful 
decision  of  the  highest  state  court ;  it  was  procured 
by  lawyers  prominent  in  the  Federal  party,  so  long 
as  that  party  existed ;  and  it  seemed  to  favor  the 
clauses  of  a  royal  English  grant,  rather  than  the 
deliberately  expressed  will  of  the  people  in  a  State 
which  had  renounced  the  sovereignty  of  the  king 
who  made  the  grant.  The  fact  that  Plumer's  inti- 
mate friend,  J.  Q.  Adams,  was  the  President  M'ho 
succeeded  Monroe,  held  the  State  to  his  support 
for  a  few  years  ;  and  even  in  1828,  when  he  was 
defeated  by  Jackson,  New  Hampshire  gave  Adams 
a  fair  majority,  and  elected  his   supporter,  John 


SOCIAL  AND   POLITICAL   DEVELOPxMENT    253 

Bell,  Governor  foi-  a  single  year,  over  the  Revolu- 
tionary veteran,  Benjauiiu  Pierce,  then  Governor, 
who  supported  Jackson.  But  in  1829  Pierce  was 
again  elected,  and  from  that  time  until  1855,  with 
a  single  exception,  the  Governors  chosen  were  of 
the  Jacksonian  Democratic  party  ;  and  New  Hamp- 
shire was  in  the  North  the  firmest  pillar  of  support 
for  that  party.  Even  in  the  year  1840,  when,  untler 
pressure  of  financial  evils,  for  which  President 
Van  Buren  was  unjustly  held  responsible,  he  was 
defeated  by  a  great  majority.  New  Hampshire  held 
fast,  and  gave  the  rejected  statesman  more  than 
6000  plurality,  in  a  total  vote  of  61,000.  One  rea- 
son for  this  doubtless  was  that  Daniel  Webster, 
who  had  been  identified  with  the  Federalists  in 
the  War  of  1812,  and  the  Dartmouth  College  case, 
and  with  the  denouncers  of  Jackson  in  his  contest 
against  the  United  States  Bank,  had  become  a  lead- 
ing opponent  of  the  New  Hampshire  Democrats, 
and  was  regarded  by  them  as  unfaithful  to  the 
State  which  gave  him  birth.  He  became  a  citizen 
of  Massachusetts  in  June,  1816,  and  the  politics  of 
the  two  States  soon  grew  sharply  antagonistic. 

Another  cause  which  threw  the  party  of  Web- 
ster and  Mason  into  disfavor  in  New  Hampshire 
was  the  claim  of  the  "  standing  order  "  of  Puritan 
Congregationalists  to  special  favor  from  the  towns 
and  the  State,  as  against  the  rising  force  of  the 
newer  sects  of  Baptists,  Methodists,  Universallsts, 
and  Christian  Baptists,  —  a  sect  which  originated 


254  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

in  eastern  New  Hampshire.  The  Congregational 
clergy,  educated  either  at  Harvard,  Dartmouth,  or 
Yale,  were  generally  Federalists.  The  leaders  of  the 
sects,  therefore,  naturally  joined  the  Democrats, 
and  in  1819,  under  a  Democratic  Governor,  Samuel 
Bell,  secured  the  passage  of  the  so-called  "  Tolera- 
tion Act,"  which  exempted  them  from  local  taxation 
for  a  church  which  they  had  renounced.  As  usual, 
the  animosity  engendered  in  this  religious  dispute 
continued,  and  strengthened  the  Democratic  party, 
whose  representatives  were  quite  often  ministers 
of  one  or  another  sect.  The  growth  of  banks,  too, 
and  the  political  alliance  between  the  banking  class 
and  the  opponents  of  Jackson,  contributed  to  aid 
the  Democrats,  and  to  make  the  name  of  Webster 
odious  in  the  State  that  is  now  so  proud  of  him. 

It  has  been  usual  to  ascribe  the  rather  narrow 
partisanship  of  New  Hampshire,  in  this  period  of 
Jacksonian  supremacy,  to  the  contrivances  and  in- 
dustry of  Isaac  Hill,  who  for  more  than  ten  years 
was  practically  the  dictator  of  Democratic  politics 
in  the  State.  He  was,  no  doubt,  a  thorough  organ- 
izer of  his  party  associates,  and  took  advantage  of 
his  widely  circulated  newspaper,  the  "  Patriot," 
published  at  the  state  capital,  to  hold  the  party 
to  his  plans,  as  Thurlow  Weed  did  in  New  York 
politics,  and  Horace  Greeley  afterwards,  in  the 
politics  of  the  whole  North.  All  these  men,  and 
other  political  leaders  who  could  be  named  (as  Rus- 
sell of  the  Boston  "  Centinel "  and  Buckinsrham  of 


SOCIAL    AND   POLITICAL   DEVELOPMENT    255 

the  Boston  "  Courier  "),  were  practical  printers,  who 
rose  from  the  "  case  "  to  the  editor's  chair,  and 
had  something  of  the  fortune  and  the  sagacity  of 
Franklin,  the  first  in  America  to  set  this  example. 
Hill,  however,  was  not  New  Hampshire  born,  but 
came  into  the  State  from  Massachusetts,  and 
brought  with  him  a  talent,  such  as  it  was,  for  po- 
litical intrigue.  But  he  had  with  him  men  of 
marked  ability  and  thorough  education,  like  Levi 
Woodbury,  whom  he  succeeded  in  the  Senate  at 
Washington,  Franklin  Pierce,  afterward  Presi- 
dent, Henry  Hubbard,  and  Moses  Norris. 

Of  these  men  Woodbury  was  the  most  distin- 
guished, and  exhibited  a  capacity  for  varied  admin- 
istrative and  judicial  tasks  which  was  remarkable. 
Like  Webster  and  Chief  Justice  Chase,  who  was 
born  in  New  Hampshire,  he  graduated  at  Dart- 
mouth, before  twenty  ;  at  twenty-seven  he  was  a 
judge  of  the  highest  state  court,  where  he  gave 
decisions  marked  by  learning  and  sound  sense ;  at 
thirty-four  he  was  Governor,  and  at  thirty -six  sena- 
tor in  Congress.  There  he  attracted  the  notice  of 
President  Jackson,  and  became  his  Secretary  of 
the  Navy,  and  afterwards  of  the  Treasury,  serving 
seven  years  in  the  cabinet,  and  upon  the  defeat  of 
Van  Buren  returning  to  the  Senate,  whence  in  1845 
he  was  taken  by  President  Polk  to  fill  the  place  of 
Story  on  the  supreme  bench.  But  for  his  death  in 
1851,  at  the  age  of  sixty-two,  he  would  probably 
have  been  nominated  by  his  party  for  President  in 


256  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

1852,  and  elected.  His  younger  friend,  Pierce,  was 
then  made  the  candidate,  and  became  President  in 

1853.  Among  men  of  this  stamp  Isaac  Hill  made 
no  mean  figure,  and  his  newspaper,  apart  from  its 
harsh  political  tone,  was  an  instructive,  civilizing 
force  in  rural  New  Hampshire.  It  was  even  less 
violent  than  the  Federalists  had  been,  when  they 
were  strong  in  the  State.  He  succeeded  Woodbury 
in  the  Senate,  then  was  Governor  for  three  years, 
and  spent  a  part  of  his  later  years  in  editing  an 
agricultural  weekly.  On  the  whole,  though  much 
inferior  to  Webster,  who  despised  him,  while  prais- 
ing Woodbury  as  a  judge.  Hill  was  probably  more 
useful  to  his  State  than  Webster  ever  was. 

Under  the  control  of  the  New  Hamjishire  Demo- 
cracy, the  financial,  educational,  and  social  inter- 
ests of  the  people  were  well  cared  for,  and  public 
virtue  and  economy  were  conspicuous,  notwith- 
standing the  bitter  political  controversies.  The 
i90,000  raised  by  taxation  for  schools  in  1823  had 
increased  in  1857,  a  generation  later,  to  8234,000, 
more  than  twice  as  much,  although  the  population 
in  the  interval  had  only  gained  thirty  per  cent. 
The  ten  state  banks  of  1822  had  grown  to  52  in 
1857,  and  their  capital  had  quadrupled  ;  while  the 
manufacturing  interest  had  invested  $20,000,000, 
and  employed  30,000  operatives,  and  the  640  miles 
of  steam  railroad  had  cost  another  $20,000,000. 
Yet  the  farming  interest  was  still  the  greatest,  and 
showed  an  investment  of  $60,000,000  in  farms  and 


SOCIAL   AND   POLITICAL   DEVELOPMENT    257 

farm  implements,  occupying  two  and  a  quarter 
million  acres  of  improved  land,  and  more  than  a 
million  of  unimproved.  New  Hampshire  had  then 
no  funded  debt,  and  her  state  expenses  were  but 
$200,000  yearly. 

The  Civil  War  soon  coming  on,  after  this  exhibit 
of  Republican  frugality  and  prosperity,  enormously 
increased  the  public  burdens.  The  soldiers  of  New 
Hampshire,  as  in  the  Revolution,  fought  in  every 
campaign,  and  in  all  parts  of  the  greatly  extended 
nation.  It  was  a  vessel  named  for  one  of  the  New 
Hampshire  mountains  (Kearsarge)  which  destroyed 
the  noted  Confederate  cruiser  Alabama,  and  she 
was  commanded  by  a  New  Hampshire  captain  and 
lieutenant,  —  the  latter  a  descendant  of  Matthew 
Thornton  of  the  Revolution.  The  state  debt  and 
the  debts  of  the  two  hundred  and  thirty-five  towns 
and  cities  vastly  multiplied,  taxation  was  trebled, 
and  the  farms  diminished  in  value  from  the  com- 
petition of  prairie  farms  with  the  stony  acres  of 
the  Granite  State.  The  population  also  fell  off, 
but  the  courage  and  industry  of  those  who  remained 
carried  the  State  through  the  ten  years  of  reduced 
prosperity. 

Looking  at  the  whole  civil  and  military  history 
of  the  State,  two  observations  occur  to  be  made. 
The  unusual  steadiness  of  popular  government,  noisy 
and  vituperative  in  the  excitement  of  annual  elec- 
tions, but  moderate  and  free  from  factions  in  ad- 
ministration, is  more  marked  in  the  case  of  New 


258  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

Hampshire  than  in  any  of  the  older  States  except 
Vermont.  Secondly,  the  high  range  of  military 
and  judicial  talent,  and  the  great  number  of  truly 
distinguished  persons  who  have  been  born  or 
dwelt  in  the  little  State,  have  made  it  proverbial 
for  the  past  century  and  a  quarter.  Of  these  facts 
the  explanation  is  to  be  found,  probably,  in  the 
simplicity  of  life  and  the  hardy  self-reliance  and 
neighborly  cooperation  of  the  people,  who  have 
brought  a  sterile  and  mountainous  land  to  such  a 
degree  of  excellent  human  productiveness  as  the  last 
hundred  years  indicate.  Necessity,  not  superfluity, 
has  been  the  companion  of  the  inhabitants  ;  they 
have  been  trained  to  labor  and  to  wait,  to  expect 
no  grand  prizes,  but  to  do  their  duty  wherever  it 
finds  them.  The  distinctions  of  rank  and  fortune 
are  natural  ones,  and  excite  neither  envy  nor  con- 
tempt ;  the  great  middle  class,  who  in  all  modern 
States  are  the  balance-wheel  of  the  political  machine, 
have  been  in  New  Hampshire  also  the  driving- 
wheel,  and  have  kept  it  in  steady  movement,  while 
guarding  against  explosions  and  misdirection. 


CHAPTER  XI 

THE   GREAT    AND   LITTLE   MEN    OF   NEW   HAMP- 
SHIRE 

In  the  stress  of  the  anti-slavery  agitation  in  New 
England,  when  New  Hampshire  was  not  playing 
the  most  honorable  part,  and  her  prominent  De- 
mocrats were  active  in  defense  of  Southern  slavery, 
to  which  both  of  the  old  parties  were  practically 
committed,  from  a  mistaken  view  of  their  constitu- 
tional duty,  Emerson  said  in  a  poem  of  1847  :  — 

"  The  God  who  made  Xew  Hampshire 
Taunted  the  lofty  land 
With  little  men  ;  — 
Small-  bat  and  wren 
House  in  the  oak." 

Yet  in  that  very  year  there  took  his  seat  in  the 
national  Senate  from  New  Hampshire  the  first  sen- 
ator distinctly  chosen  to  represent  the  opinion 
against  slavery  which  was  finally  to  triumph  in  the 
nation,  —  John  Parker  Hale.  He  was  neither  a 
great  nor  a  little  man,  but  one  of  the  many  able 
leaders  of  the  people  who  have  carried  along  the 
affairs  of  the  State  with  distinction  and  success, 
according  to  the  nature  of  the  exigency  as  it  arose, 
and  whatever  it  might  be.    The  line  began  in  early 


2G0  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

colonial  days,  and  was  represented  for  more  than 
half  a  century  by  stalwart  Englishmen  who  had 
chosen  to  live  here  in  a  new  country,  and  who  had 
plenty  of  the  English  virtues  of  valor,  persistency, 
patience,  and  leadership.  Such  were  Wheelwright 
and  Bachiler,  Waldron  and  AVentworth,  founders 
or  defenders  of  the  infant  settlements  ;  to  whom 
were  added  in  due  time  others  from  England  like 
Vaughan  and  the  Cutts,  or  from  Massachusetts, 
like  Nathaniel  Weare,  Joshua  Moodey,  and  the 
Gilmr.ns  of  Exeter.  Some  of  them  were  eloquent 
preachers,  others  strict  magistrates  or  brave  cap- 
tains in  the  hmg  contest  with  savage  foes.  It  was 
not  nntil  the  next  century,  however,  the  eight- 
eenth, that  men  appeared  in  New  Hampshire  who 
might  be  called  great,  wherever  they  had  been  born 
or  had  lived.  Such  were  Stark,  Langdon,  and 
Weare,  of  the  Revolutionary  period,  and  Sir  John 
Wentworth  and  Sir  Benjauiin  Thompson  (Count 
Rumford  in  Bavaria),  of  that  and  the  succeeding 
period.  Thompson  spent  but  a  few  years  in  New 
Hampshire,  and  his  chief  reputation  was  won  in 
Bav^aria  or  in  England.  But  for  Franklin,  Count 
Rumford  would  be  the  most  distinguished  man  of 
science  produced  by  colonial  America  ;  and  he  is 
even  now  more  valued  than  in  his  lifetime,  for 
pioneering  discoveries  not  then  fully  recognized  as 
important.  Sir  John  Wentworth  has  already  been 
sufficiently  noticed. 

John  Stark  was  the  chief  military  man  in  the 


THE   GREAT   AND   LITTLE   MEN  261 

whole  history  of  New  Plampshire,  which  includes 
mauy  others  noted  for  courage  and  conduct.  He 
was  born  in  the  Province,  his  father,  Archibald 
Stark,  having  but  recently  come  over  fi'om  Glasgow 
in  Scotland,  although  the  ancestors  are  said  to  have 
been  more  remotely  German.  Trained  to  a  hardy 
outdoor  life,  he  became  noted  for  agility  and  en- 
durance, though  not  of  such  large  frame  and  com- 
manding aspect  as  several  of  his  compatriots  were. 
He  early  learned  all  the  traits  of  Indian  life  and 
savage  warfare,  and  was  for  some  time,  before  the 
French  and  Indian  war,  a  captive  among  the  Ca- 
nadian Indians,  who  testified  much  respect  for  his 
manly  qualities.  In  the  war  which  first  showed 
Washington  to  the  world  for  what  he  was,  Stark 
also  had  his  years  of  discipline  and  his  test  of  sol- 
diership. He  was  among  the  many  friends  and 
admirers  of  Lord  Howe,  who  died  in  one  of  the 
fights  in  which  Stark  took  part,  and  he  seems  to 
have  profited  by  that  great  commander's  example. 
The  war  ended,  he  went  back  to  his  forest  farm 
and  his  saw-mill,  and  was  at  work  in  the  mill  when 
the  news  of  the  Lexington  fight  reached  him.  He 
rode  at  once  to  the  scene  of  action,  enlisted  and 
drilled  a  regiment,  and  at  Bunker  Hill  did  the  most 
strategic  and  effective  fighting.  He  was  present 
at  several  of  the  battles  of  1775-76,  and  distin- 
guished himself  again  at  Trenton  ;  but  his  capital 
service  was  what  has  been  described,  his  capture  of  a 
large  British  force  at  Bennington,  after  two  sharp 


262  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

engagements  on  the  same  clay.  His  later  services 
were  not  conspicuous  during  the  war,  but  were 
valuable  by  reason  of  his  strictness  of  discipline, 
at  a  time  when  the  bonds  of  civil  society  were 
much  loosened  through  long  continuance  of  a  civil 
war,  —  the  worst  of  evils,  morally  considered,  if  it 
lasts  for  several  years.  After  the  war  he  remained 
true  to  the  democratic  principles  which  he  had 
ever  maintained,  and  which  make  a  singular  con- 
trast to  his  ideas  of  military  subordination.  He 
bore  with  impatience  the  slight  reaction  toward 
Tory  practices  which  the  Federalists  inaugurated, 
and  welcomed  heartily  the  introduction  of  more 
Democratic  and  "  Old  Whig  "  practices  under  Jef- 
ferson and  Madison.  In  this  he  had  the  sympa- 
thy of  John  Langdon,  the  wealthy  merchant  and 
polite  gentleman,  whose  manners  were  the  reverse 
of  Stark's, 

Stark's  life  extended  from  1728  to  May,  1822, 
longer  than  any  of  the  noteworthy  men  of  the 
Province  and  the  Revolution.  John  Langdon,  who 
was  eleven  years  younger,  died  three  years  earlier 
(1739-1819)  ;  his  cousin.  Rev.  Dr.  Samuel  Lang- 
don, born  in  1723,  had  died  more  than  twenty 
years  before,  November  29,  1797.  Sulliv^an,  the 
youngest  of  these  foui",  died  first  of  all,  January 
23,  1795.  Each  in  his  way  was  important  in  the 
crisis  of  his  State  and  nation.  Sullivan  early  came 
to  high  military  rank,  and  was  also  an  influential 
member  of   Congress   during   the  wai\    His  cam- 


THE   GREAT   AND   LITTLE   MEN  263 

paigns  were  varied  with  success  and  defeat ;  he  was 
once  captured  by  the  British,  and  then  became  the 
bearer  of  a  message  of  conciliation  from  the  invad- 
ing army,  from  which  he  hoped  more  good  than 
Franklin,  Washington,  or  the  Adamses  could  see 
in  it.  Mercurial  in  temper,  ready  of  speech,  brave, 
and  confident,  he  was  also  accessible  to  flattery, 
and  had  not  that  steady,  patient  valor  which  was 
so  marked  in  Washington  and  Stark.  His  educa- 
tion was  good,  he  wrote  and  spoke  well,  and  was 
usually  popular.  He  lost  votes  rather  than  gained 
them  by  his  most  honorable  exploit,  the  suppression 
of  the  revolt  of  1786.  His  grandson  and  name- 
sake. Judge  John  Sullivan  of  Exeter,  gave  this 
sketch  of  General  Sullivan's  aspect :  — 

"  In  person  he  was  short,  about  five  feet  six  or  seven 
in  height ;  very  erect  and  well  formed ;  his  hair  and 
complexion  dark,  his  cheeks  red,  and  his  eyes  black 
and  piercing.  His  manners  were  dignified,  but  easy  and 
graceful,  and  he  had  a  faculty  of  making  each  one  in 
a  company  think  himself  an  object  of  particular  atten- 
tion. Hospitable  and  fond  of  display,  he  was  prodigal 
of  money ;  in  his  dealings,  honest,  generous,  and  honor- 
able; in  temper,  ordinarily  mild  and  tranquil,  and  far 
removed  from  petulance.  When  roused  to  resentment 
he  was  stormy  and  violent.  His  mother,  a  small  woman, 
was  remarkable  for  her  beauty,  her  vanity,  talents,  and 
energy ;  and  not  less  remarkable  for  the  violence  of  her 
temper." 

The  Lansrdons  were  no  less  noticeable  for  their 


264  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

good  looks  and  good  manners.  Dr.  Langdon,  the 
eldest,  probably  the  most  learned  man  of  his 
time  in  New  Hampshire,  was  for  twenty-seven 
years  pastor  of  the  wealthiest  congTegation  in  the 
Province,  and  from  his  pulpit  were  taken  two 
college  presidents,  —  himself  for  Harvard  (where 
he  had  graduated  at  seventeen)  in  1774 ;  and  Dr. 
Ezra  Stiles,  invited  from  the  church  Dr.  Langdon 
had  left,  to  the  presidency  of  Yale  College  in  1777. 
Though  a  Bostonian  born.  Dr.  Langdon  (whose 
doctorate  was  given  by  Aberdeen  in  1762)  did  not 
please  some  critical  Bostonians  who  governed  Hai-- 
vard,  and  he  was  perhaps  unfitted  for  the  tasks 
of  college  discipline,  then  rather  unhinged  by  the 
long  war.  Accordingly,  he  resigned  the  presidency 
in  1780,  and  spent  the  rest  of  his  honorable  life 
in  the  quiet  parish  of  Hampton  Falls,  where  Presi- 
dent Weare  of  New  Hampshire  was  his  parishioner, 
and  where  Paine  Wingate,  afterward  judge  and 
senator  in  Congress,  had  preceded  him  as  pastor.^ 

^  I  was  born  and  spent  twenty  years  of  my  life  in  this  parish 
where  Dr.  Langdon  was  still  well  remembered ;  he  had  been  the 
pastor  of  my  four  grandparents,  and  my  aunts,  as  children,  had 
gone  in  and  ont  of  the  small  parsonage,  not  so  spacious  or  pic- 
turesque as  the  Old  Manse.  He  is  buried  in  the  older  of  two  ceme- 
teries, near  the  graves  of  four  generations  of  Sanborns,  and  two 
miles  away  from  the  graves  of  President  Weare  and  the  first 
minister,  Theophilus  Cotton,  a  grandson  of  John  of  Boston. 
Dr.  Langdon  had  diverged  from  the  stricter  Calvinism  of  his  an- 
cestors, and  was  perhaps  an  Arminian,  as  his  pubished  writings 
rather  faintly  show.  John  Eliot,  brother-in-law  of  Dr.  Belknap, 
the  historian,  writing  in  November,  1774,  says    of  the  Harvard 


THE   GREAT   AND   LITTLE   MEN  265 

Di\  Langdon  aided  effectively  in  forming  a  Con- 
stitution for  the  State,  and  in  promoting  the  ac- 
ceptance of  the  Federal  Constitution  ;  was  a  clear 
and  rather  lively  writer,  liberal  in  his  theology,  and 
a  correspondent,  like  Dr.  Stiles,  of  many  of  his 
learned  contemporaries  in  America  and  Europe. 

John  Langdon,  though  bearing  military  titles, 
and  occasionally  serving  in  the  field,  as  at  Ben- 
nington, Saratoga,  and  Newport,  was  a  man  for  the 
council  board  and  the  counting-room  rather  than 
for  the  camp.  Early  successful  as  a  merchant,  and 
partly  bred  in  England,  he  was  firm  in  his  princi- 
ples but  gentle  in  his  manners,  and  carried  on  in 
Portsmouth  the  tradition  of  hospitality  and  urban- 
ity which  Governor  Wentworth  had  so  agreeably 
kept  up.  He  presided  over  the  United  States  Sen- 
President  :  "  In  the  academical  chair  I  think  him  a  rampages  of 
good  sense,  much  learning,  more  arrogance,  and  no  less  conceit." 
When  the  agitation  for  his  withdrawal  began,  and  the  unruly 
students  petitioned  the  electors  to  remove  their  president,  Mr. 
Eliot  writes  that  one  of  their  charges  against  him  was  "  his 
unbecoming  way  of  addressing  the  Deity."  This  must  have 
been  particularly  harassing  to  the  young  scapegraces.  They 
are  also  said  to  have  addressed  the  venerable  scholar,  thus  : 
*'  As  a  man  of  genius  and  knowledge  we  respect  you  ;  as  a  man 
of  piety  and  virtue  we  venerate  you  ;  as  a  president  we  despise 
you."  Rev.  William  Gordon,  historian  of  the  Revolution,  de- 
clared, in  the  meeting  of  the  college  overseers,  "  that  the  whole 
proceeding  arose  from  the  mere  malice  of  one  of  the  governors 
of  the  College  (Mr.  Winthrop,  the  librarian),  who  had  the  impu- 
dence to  tell  Dr.  and  Mrs.  Langdon  that  he  had  long  sought  an 
opportunity  to  revenge  an  affront  some  years  since,"  etc.  In  his 
parish  he  was  useful,  courteous,  and  beloved. 


266  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

ate  for  its  first  few  weeks,  before  Vice-President 
Adams  took  the  cluiir,  and  is  reported  to  have  been 
more  accei^table  in  that  office  than  the  admira- 
ble but  fidgety  and  egotistic  Adams.  As  Governor 
of  New  Hampshire,  Langdon  was  popular  and 
gracious,  without  distinguishing  himself  by  the 
advocacy  of  any  important  measures,  and  he  lived 
to  see  his  party,  that  of  Jefferson  and  Madison, 
fully  established  in  control  of  the  national  gov- 
ernment, as  did  his  friend  General  Stark. 

Particulars  of  John  Langdon's  life  are  none  too 
well  known.  Two  sketches  of  it  exist,  —  by  Gov- 
ernor Plumer,  his  contemporary  and  successor  at 
the  head  of  the  New  Hampshire  Republicans,  and 
by  his  own  grandson  and  namesake,  John  Langdon 
Elwyn.  The  latter,  a  humorous,  incoherent  writer, 
says  of  him,  with  justice  :  — 

"  The  name  of  Jacobin  could  not  drive  him  from  his 
Democratic  ground.  From  liis  choice  of  party  to  his 
twelfth  year  of  senatorship,  neither  the  flattering  friend- 
ship of  Washington,  the  sophistry  nor  the  courting  of 
Hamilton,  from  wliom  he  said  he  received  the  highest 
comi)liment  of  his  life,  the  fury  of  John  Adams's  reign, 
the  drawing-rooms  of  Philadelphia,  of  which  he  was  a 
distincruislied  ornament,  nor  the  long,  lonjj  discourajje- 
nient  of  a  minority,  ever  dictated  a  vote  of  this  well- 
tried  Democrat.  Though  the  honor  afterward  paid  him, 
by  a  great  and  triumphant  l)arty,  for  this  political  career 
as  Senator,  was  boundless  wherever  he  was  known  ;  and 
though  for  twelve  years  he  was  the  gayest  of  men,  and 


THE   GREAT  AND   LITTLE   MEN  267 

conceded  to  be  one  of  the  most  engaging  and  elegant 
gentlemen  in  the  most  exclusive  ciicles  in  the  United 
States,  his  grandchildren  never  knew  him  to  speak  of 
this  part  of  his  life,  of  himself.  The  speech  of  Hamilton 
to  him  we  never  heard  him  tell  but  once ;  but  the  spirit 
with  which  he  told  it  showed  he  understood  it.  On  some 
occasion  he  happened  to  take  the  Secretary  home  with 
him  in  his  carriage  :  '  Sir,'  said  Mr.  Langdon,  '  you  are 
riding  with  one  of  your  stanchest  political  enemies.' 
'  Sir,'  said  General  Hamilton,  throwing  his  hat  down  on 
the  floor  of  the  chariot,  '  I  see  an  honest  man.'  He, 
with  all  the  Senate  but  five,  voted  for  the  first  Bank  of 
the  United  States,  and  was  an  original  subscriber  of  some 
account.  He  had  been  concerned  in  the  Bank  of  North 
America,  the  real  fii'st  national  bank  ;  he  was  an  inti- 
mate friend  of  Robert  Morris.  He  voted  in  the  Senate 
for  the  Funding  System  of  Hamilton  ;  his  colleague, 
Paine  Wingate,  against  it.  He  voted  against  assuming,  or 
trying  to  assume,  the  real  debts  of  the  States :  it  passed 
the  House,  even  Mr.  Gerry  helping.  Mr.  Langdon  by  his 
own  efforts  stopped  it  in  the  Senate.  He  had  now  to 
face  a  danger  he  was  more  likely  to  take  account  of  than 
of  his  limbs,  —  public  odium  for  the  first  time  in  his  life  : 
he  faced  it.  When  the  Alien  and  Sedition  laws  were 
passed,  he  lost  no  time  in  making* known  his  judgment 
concerning  them.  He  stood  stanchly  against  the  war- 
like drift  of  President  Adams's  majorities,  —  getting 
sometimes  into  a  minority  of  five,  in  which  was  a  young 
gentleman  [Andrew  Jackson,  then  Senator  from  Tennes- 
see] whose  after-conspicuousness  as  captain  and  states- 
man, he  may  have  foreseen.  Investigation  of  his  political 
life  but  discovers  some  overlooked  debt  his  country  owes 


2G8  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

him.  Of  what  made  the  American  war  and  protected  it, 
of  what  fabricated  the  Constitution,  he  had  thorough 
knowledge  ;  the  heroes  and  demigods  of  our  IHad  and 
Odyssey,  he  knew  them  alL  The  rest  of  his  poHtical 
career  belongs  to  his  native  State,  in  which  it  was  as 
brilliant  as  tliat  tlieatre  could  make  it." 

Less  whimsical,  but  perhaps  not  less  prejudiced, 
William  Plimier  said  of  Laiigdon  :  — 

"  He  was  a  man  of  decent  talents,  but  neither  [were 
they]  great  nor  brilliant.  In  early  and  middle  life  he  was 
liberal  of  his  money,  but  not  profuse  or  lavish  ;  his  man- 
ners were  easy,  ])olite,  and  insinuating,  and  his  habits 
peculiarly  social.  He  courted  i)opularity  with  the  zeal  of 
a  lover  and  the  constancy  of  a  martyr ;  and  by  his  man- 
ners and  habits  was  well  qualified  to  acquire  and  retain 
it.  While  most  others  lost  property  by  the  Revolution, 
he  acquired  a  considerable  estate,  and  at  the  same  time 
rendered  useful  services  to  the  nation.  In  New  Hamp' 
shire  he  was  the  head  of  that  party  which  assumed  the 
name  of  Republicans  ;  and  before  President  Washing- 
ton's second  term  expired,  Mr.  Langdon  declared  he 
wished  a  change  of  men  in  the  government, /rom  Presi- 
dent to  doorkeeper.  Few  men  in  New  Hampshire  ever 
obtained  so  many  offices,  or  held  them  for  a  longer 
})eriod.  He  owed  his  elections  not  to  distinguished  tal- 
ents, but  to  his  fascinating  address,  amenity  of  manners, 
and  his  social  habit  of  greeting  every  man  he  met.  As 
Governor,  his  deportment  was  easy  and  dignified.  His 
speeches,  messages,  and  vetoes  were  not  above  medi- 
ocrity." 

Whatever  Langdon's  other  talents  were,  he  had 


THE   GREAT   AND   LITTLE   MEN  269 

the  talent  for  success,  and  the  modesty  which  too 
rarely  goes  with  it.  His  party,  to  which  he  ad- 
hered as  faithfully  as  he  had  championed  the  pa- 
triot cause  in  the  Revolution,  would  have  elected 
him  Vice-President  in  1812,  had  he  not  declined. 
He  had  wished,  the  year  before,  to  decline  reelec- 
tion as  governor,  but  so  great  was  the  wish  of  his 
friends  to  vote  for  him  that  he  was  persuaded 
to  stand,  and  it  was  while  in  this  office  that  he 
refused  to  be  Vice-President.  He  told  Plumer,  his 
successor,  that  "  if  his  motives  were  purely  selfish, 
and  regarded  his  own  reputation,  he  should  never 
again  appear  in  public,  and  was  impatient  to  retire 
to  private  life."  In  his  two  letters  declining  the 
vice-presidency,  he  said  :  — 

"  I  beg  leave  to  add  that  I  am  now  [June,  1812] 
seventy-one  years  of  age,  my  faculties  blunted,  have  lived 
the  last  forty  years  of  my  life  in  the  Avhlrlpool  of  poh- 
tics,  and  am  longing  for  the  sweets  of  retirement.  My 
advanced  age  forbids  my  undertaking  long  journeys,  and 
renders  me  incapable  of  performing  the  important  duties 
of  Vice-President  with  any  advantage  to  our  beloved 
country,  or  honor  to  myself.  To  launch  again  upon  the 
ocean  of  politics,  at  my  time  of  life,  appears  to  me  highly 
improper.  ...  I  should  have  thought  it  an  honor,  and  it 
would  have  been  my  highest  pleasure,  to  serve  my  coun- 
try in  any  station  while  my  great  and  good  friend,  Mr. 
Madison,  continued  in  the  Presidency  ;  as  I  consider  him 
one  of  our  greatest  statesmen,  an  ornament  to  our  coun- 
try, and  above  all,  the  noblest  work  of  God,  an  honest 
man.'' 


270  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

This  was  very  unlike  the  opinion  which  3'oung 
Daniel  Webster  and  his  associates,  the  New  Hamp- 
shire Federalists,  then  held  and  expressed  of  Madi- 
son ;  but  it  is  what  the  sober  judgment  of  posterity 
maintains.  He  was  not  equal  to  the  active  tasks 
of  war,  as  Langdon  had  been  in  his  day,  but  his 
statesmanship  and  integrity  were  beyond  question. 
John  Langdon  survived  to  see  his  State  return  to 
the  Republican  faith,  after  the  war  with  England, 
and  died  in  1819,  —  never  having  left  New  Hamp- 
shire after  1811,  except  to  attend  the  funeral  of  his 
sister,  the  wife  of  Governor  Eustis  of  Massachu- 
setts. 

His  only  brother,  Judge  Woodbury  Langdon, 
who  had  been,  like  John,  a  sea  captain  and  a  pros- 
perous merchant,  got  the  reputation  of  a  Tory  early 
in  the  Revolution,  by  making  a  voyage  to  London 
to  regain  property  which  was  threatened  by  the 
war.  Returning  in  1777,  after  a  year  or  two  in 
London,  he  was  imprisoned  in  New  York  by  the 
British,  and  after  his  escape,  joined  his  relatives  in 
active  hostility  to  England.  Like  his  brother,  he 
was  handsome  and  accomplished,  and  with  a  turn 
for  wit  which  the  more  popular  John  concealed,  if 
he  had  it.  When  impeached  by  the  New  Hamp- 
shire House  in  1790,  for  alleged  neglect  of  his 
duties  as  judge  of  the  highest  state  court,  he  ad- 
mitted the  fact,  gave  his  reasons  for  absence,  and 
retorted  by  charging  the  legislature  with  improper 
interference  in  the  business  of  the  court.    In  August 


THE   GREAT   AND   LITTLE   MEN  271 

following,  his  trial  by  the  State  Senate  was  ap- 
pointed (a  body  of  which  he  had  been  president)  at 
Exeter.  He  presented  himself  for  trial,  but  the 
Senate  found  they  had  no  rij^ht  to  sit  in  the  recess 
of  the  whole  legislature.  Says  Plumer,  who  rejjorts 
the  case : — 

"  Judge  Laugdon  urged  the  Senators  to  proceed  ;  the 
senior  Senator,  unwilling  to  avow  the  real  cause  of  de- 
lay, observed  there  was  not  a  full  Senate  present.  The 
judge  replied  '  He  took  no  exception  to  their  absence,  — 
he  was  even  willing  to  dispense  with  the  attendance  of 
some  who  were  present.'  But  the  trial  was  postponed 
to  the  winter  session  in  1791.  Before  that  time  Presi- 
dent Washington  had  appointed  him  to  a  federal  office, 
which  he  accepted,  and  resigned  his  office  of  judge.  On 
the  eve  of  his  departure  for  Philadelphia  (January  17, 
1791),  in  a  letter  resigning,  he  stated  freely  his  opinion 
of  the  importance  of  the  office  of  a  judge,  the  inade- 
quacy of  the  salary, — and  complained  of  tiie  encroach- 
ments of  the  Legislature  upon  the  Judiciary,  in  passing 
bills  to  annul  their  judgments.  He  observed,  '  Many  are 
impatiently  waiting  to  fill  my  place  ;  yet  I  hope  the  Ex- 
ecutive will  be  directed  to  make  choice  of  such  a  gen- 
tleman as  will  he  a  credit  to  the  appointment, — not 
an  ignoj-amus,  —  no  sluggard,  no  sycophant.'  His  letter 
was  accompanied  with  a  vindication  of  his  conduct  as 
judge,  and  his  answer  to  the  articles  of  impeachment. 
The  House  of  Representatives  voted  [January  22]  that, 
as  the  judge  was  under  an  impeachment,  he  ought  not  to 
be  permitted  to  resign,  and  that  he  was  guilty  of  contempt. 
But  four  days  later  they  ordered  the  Managers  not  to 


272  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

prosecute  the  impeachment.  At  the  same  time  they 
j)asse(l  an  address  to  the  President  (Dr.  Bartlett)  and 
Council,  requesting  tlieni  to  remove  the  judge  from  the 
office  he  had  resigned.  The  Senate  unanimously  non- 
concurred.  Thus  ended  tlie  impeachment,  wliich  was 
instituted  more  to  gratify  personal  pique  and  private  re- 
sentment than  to  promote  the  jJuhlic  interest." 

This  was  the  first  and  perhaps  the  last  judicial 
impeachment  in  the  State's  history.  Judge  Lang- 
don  forfeited  popularity  by  his  plain  speech  and 
arbitrary  manners  ;  but  on  the  whole  Plumer,  who 
knew  him  well  after  1780  till  his  death  in  1805, 
gives  him  a  good  character  :  — 

'•  In  1796,  when  a  candidate  for  Congress,  he  he- 
loT)ged  to  the  anti-Federalist  party,  then  in  a  minority  ; 
and  no  man  of  that  party,  however  pure  his  character 
or  great  his  talents,  could  command  a  majority.  In  the 
offices  he  held  he  displayed  great  ability,  and  no  man 
ever  performed  more  public  duty  in  less  time.  He  was 
a  man  of  great  independence  and  decision,  bold,  keen 
and  sarcastic,  and  spoke  his  mind  with  great  freedom. 
He  maintained  his  opinions  with  firmness,  and  looked 
with  contemjjt  on  the  mean  and  base  acts  practised  to 
obtain  ])opularity ;  abliorred  duplicity,  and,  tho'  shrewd 
and  discerning,  was  open  and  frank  as  j)ru(lence  required. 
He  was  distinguished  for  quickness  of  apjn-ehension  and 
soundness  of  judgment,  and  in  ])oint  of  talents  few  men, 
if  any  in  the  State,  exceeded  him.  To  his  friends  he 
was  attentive,  and  to  his  personal  enemies  (and  he  had 
many)  he  was  unyielding.    It  was  his  maxim,  when  he  was 


THE  GREAT  AND   LITTLE   MEN  273 

obliged  to  quarrel  with  any  man,  '  not  to  quarrel  at  the 
halves.' "  ^ 

When  the  violent  Federalist  party  was  formed 
in  New  Hampshire,  in  the  second  administration 
of  Washington,  that  great  name  was  made  to  sanc- 
tion a  deal  of  bitterness  and  contempt  for  the  "  dirty 
Deemocrats,"  as  a  high-placed  dame  used  to  style 
the  party  of  Jefferson,  Langdon,  Stark,  and  Madi- 
son. The  atrocities  of  the  French  Revolution,  to- 
gether with  its  manifest  absurdities,  had  so  excited 
the  fears  of  the  comfortable  and  respectable  minis- 
ters, lawyers,  merchants,  and  large  farmers  in  New 
England,  that  they  really  dreaded  a  social  uprising 
and  overturn  in  this  quiet  corner  of  the  earth. 
This  caused  a  reaction  from  the  exaltation  of  mind 
in  which  our  ancestors  had  declared  what  Abraham 
Lincoln  called  Jefferson's  manifesto  of  1776,  "  the 
axioms  of  free  society."  The  aristocratic  instincts, 
never  far  beneath  the  surface  in  men  of  English 
descent,  revived  and  became  prominent  again,  as 
before  the  Revolution,  and  the  sacred  cause  of  re- 
ligion itself  was  supposed  to  be  threatened  by  the 
new  Republicans  of  Virginia  and  Vermont.  The 
natural  conservatism  of  the  New  Hampshire  peo- 
ple, satisfied  with  Washington  for  his  grand  career 

^  A  good  portrait  of  this  elegant  and  willful  gentleman,  appar- 
ently painted  in  London,  exists,  and  has  been  copied  for  the  Sen- 
ate Chamber  in  Concord.  His  impeachment  was  partly  managed 
by  Judge  Smith,  afterward  chief  justice  and  governor,  who  had 
as  much  wit  and  almost  as  much  good  looks. 


274  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

in  war  and  peace,  resented  any  intimation  that  vio- 
lent partisans  had  his  ear  and  misused  his  authority. 
In  this  period  of  exaggeration  and  appreliension, 
the  State  being  deeply  in  debt,  and  the  towns 
heavily  burdened  with  their  ow'n  debts  and  taxes, 
wild  schemes  for  relief,  such  as  came  to  the  surface 
in  the  Exeter  rising  of  1786,  were  again  agitated, 
and  the  mercantile  and  legal  classes  were  compelled 
to  be  constantly  on  their  guard  against  some  dan- 
gerous popular  delusion,  and  the  odium  that,  for 
one  cause  or  another,  lawyers  had  provoked  or  en- 
countered. The  men  of  this  profession  therefore 
were  generally  Federalists,  and  among  them  were 
several  who  became  eminent,  —  Jeremiah  Smith 
of  Peterborough  and  Exeter,  William  Plumer  of 
Epping,  Jeremiah  Mason  of  Portsmouth,  and,  more 
than  all,  their  youngest  associate,  Daniel  Webster. 
On  the  other  side  were  most  of  the  men  who  had 
been  officers  in  the  war.  Stark,  Cilley,  Cass  (father 
of  the  Michigan  governor  and  statesman,  Lewis 
Cass),  Pierce,  the  father  of  President  Pierce,  and 
others  of  less  note.  The  heads  of  Dartmouth  Col- 
lege and  of  the  academies  (notably  that  in  Exeter) 
were  Federalists,  and  so,  generally,  were  men  edu- 
cated as  clergymen  who.  became  politicians,  like 
Wingate  of  Stratham  and  Foster  of  Canterbury. 

Among  the  Federalists  were  several  men  who 
had  originally  been  loyalists,  or  neutral ;  among 
these  were  Joshua  Atherton  of  Amherst,  and  one 
of  the  uncles  of  Cynthia   Dunbar,  the  mother  of 


THE  GREAT  AND  LITTLE  MEN  275 

Henry  Thoreau,  who  lived  in  New  Hampshire. 
Her  father,  Asa  Dunbar  of  Keene,  who  had  also 
inclined  to  Toryism  after  marrying  the  only  daugh- 
ter of  the  loyalist  Colonel  Jones  of  Weston,  would 
have  been  a  Federalist,  no  doubt,  had  he  not  died 
in  the  year  the  Constitution  was  framed,  1787. 
The  leading  lawyer  in  the  Connecticut  valley,  Ben- 
jamin West,  was  a  Federalist,  and  so  continued, 
for  he  was  a  delegate  to  the  Hartford  Convention 
of  1814-15;  while  William  Plumer  followed  the 
example  of  his  younger  friend,  John  Quincy  Adams, 
and  left  the  party  during  Jefferson's  presidency. 
Tlie  Gilmans  of  Exeter  were  generally  Federalists, 
the  exception  being  Nicholas,  who  served  in  Con- 
gress and  the  Constitutional  Convention  with  John 
Langdon,  and  he  had  originally  been  of  the  same 
party  with  the  rest  of  his  family.  The  Livermores 
of  Portsmouth  and  Holderness  were  also  Feder- 
alists, —  the  head  of  the  family  having  been  at- 
torney-general, chief  justice,  member  of  Congress, 
and  often  in  the  legislature. 

All  these  persons  were  distinguished,  and  merited 
their  distincticm,  but  no  sketch  of  them  is  called 
for  here,  unless  they  had  some  special  title  to  fame. 
William  Plumer  had ;  his  career  was  unlike  that 
of  the  rest,  and  gave  him  prominence  in  many  ways. 
Beginning  life  in  Massachusetts,  under  keen  reli- 
gious impressions,  his  first  aim  was  to  be  a  preacher. 
At  the  strong  desire  of  his  father,  he  became  a 
farmer  in  Epping,  but  could  not  relinquish  his 


276  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

ambition  for  a  more  public  way  of  life,  and  studied 
law,  rather  irregularly.  His  strength  of  mind  and 
application  were  such  that  he  soon  became  a  leader 
at  the  Rockingham  bar,  and  at  the  same  time  en- 
tered vigorously  into  public  life,  while  privately 
cultivating  a  taste  for  history  and  literature,  and 
conducting  an  extensive  correspondence,  particu- 
larly, for  some  years,  with  his  rival  at  the  bar,  Judge 
Smith,  who  had  been  a  very  jouthf ul  soldier  under 
Stark  at  Bennington,  while  Plumer  in  the  Revolu- 
tion seems  to  have  inclined  at  first  toward  the 
mother  country.  After  serving  for  a  dozen  years 
in  the  state  legislature,  and  accumulating  a  com- 
petency in  his  profession,  Plumer  became  senator 
in  Congress,  in  1803,  holding  Federalist  opinions, 
and  very  severe  in  his  criticism  of  Jefferson  and 
the  Republicans.  In  1804,  convinced  that  several 
of  the  Federalist  leaders  in  Congress  from  New 
England  meditated  disunion,  his  party  zeal  cooled 
perceptibly.  It  was  from  him,  in  part,  that  J.  Q. 
Adams  derived  information  which  led  him  after- 
ward to  denounce  Federalists  from  Massachusetts 
and  Connecticut  as  disunionists  ;  and  the  corre- 
spondence since  made  public  shows  that  they  were. 
In  the  Senate  Plumer  first  met  Henry  Clay,  who, 
not  yet  thirty,  had  been  sent  to  represent  Kentucky 
among  his  seniors.  His  own  observations  and  the 
influence  of  Adams  and  Clay  led  him  to  support  the 
party  of  Jefferson  and  iSIadison,  tliough  not  agree- 
ing in  all  their  policy,  and  when  Langdon  withdrew 


THE   GREAT   AND   LITTLE   MEN  277 

from  further  public  life,  Plumer  became  the  head 
of  the  New  Hampshire  Republicans,  and  was  Gov- 
ernor in  the  first  year  of  the  short  war  with  Eng- 
land, which  Smith  and  Mason,  the  Livermores  and 
Webster,  sincerely  opposed.  Wlien  as  Governor  he 
planned  to  make  Dartmouth  College  a  State  Uni- 
versity, modeled  after  the  University  of  Jefferson 
and  Madison,  it  was  partly  the  old  virus  of  political 
animosity  which  brought  Smith,  Mason,  and  Web- 
ster into  the  field  of  law  against  him  ;  and  their 
learning,  eloquence,  and  social  influence  defeated 
his  plans.  Retiring  from  public  life  in  1819,  soon 
after  his  eldest  son  entered  Congress,  Plumer  de- 
termined to  write  the  political  history  of  the  United 
States,  and  made  large  collections  of  material,  both 
printed  and  manuscript,  for  that  purpose.  But  the 
main  fruit  of  his  industiy  in  that  direction  was  a 
mass  of  brief  biographies,  only  a  few  of  which  have 
yet  been  printed,  and  the  contributions  which  his 
son  used  in  his  spirited  life  of  Plumer.  The  char- 
acter of  the  father  was  severe  and  saturnine,  a  great 
contrast  to  Langdon  and  Sullivan,  and  his  popu- 
larity was  owing  to  a  strong  impression  of  ability 
and  honesty,  which  his  puritanic  attitude  conveyed. 
His  written  style  is  heavy,  and  Ids  verdict  on  his 
contemporaries  colored  by  prejudice ;  but  he  has 
supplied  history  with  a  store  of  valuable  and  often 
piquant  detail. 

Plumer  was   but  twenty-four  •  when   peace  with 
England  was  declared,  and  he  could  hardly  have 


278  NEW    HAMPSHIRE 

distinguished  himself  in  that  struggle ;  but  he 
knew  personally  most  of  the  patriots,  and  several 
of  the  loyalists,  and  what  he  says  of  them  is  in- 
structive, if  tinged  with  dislike,  of  which  he  was 
very  capable.  Of  one  ])atriot,  Meshech  Weare  of 
Hampton  Falls,  he  finds  nothing  but  good  to  say ; 
and  this  exception  to  his  habit  of  severity  points 
to  the  fact  that  Weare  was  the  one  indispensable 
man  in  New  Hampshire  through  the  critical  period 
of  the  Revolution.  He  was  older  even  than  Stark, 
being  born  in  1713,  in  the  small  township  which 
he  seldom  left,  except  to  go  through  Harvard  Col- 
lege and  to  transact  public  business ;  and  he  con- 
tinued in  the  service  of  his  Province  and  State  until 
within  a  few  months  of  his  death,  at  the  age  of 
seventy-three.  Leaving  college  in  1735,  he  expected 
to  become  a  clergyman  ;  but  his  marriage  to  a  lady 
of  some  landed  property  turned  him  aside  to  its 
cultivation,  and  she  built  in  1737,  on  a  low  hill  in 
the  midst  of  it,  the  simple  unpainted  wooden  man- 
sion, where  the  rest  of  his  life  was  spent.  With  no 
special  military  education,  he  early  bore  the  title 
of  Colonel,  from  his  command  of  a  county  regi- 
ment ;  and  he  followed  the  example  of  his  father 
and  grandfather  in  taking  an  active  part  in  the 
Assembly  and  Council  of  the  Province.  He  became 
a  judge  by  the  appointment  of  Benning  Went- 
worth,  —  his  ancestors  having  for  two  generations 
held  much  the  same  place  in  Hampton  that  the 
Wentworth  family  did  in  Portsmouth,  except  in 


THE   GREAT   AND   LITTLE   MEN  279 

point  of  wealth.  They  were  independent  in  fortune, 
but  did  not  accumulate,  and  had  no  uneasy  ambi- 
tion for  conspicuous  office.  Nathaniel  Weare,  his 
grandfather,  had  spent  a  year  or  two  in  England 
during  the  troubled  times  of  Cranfield  and  Bare- 
foot, as  the  agent  of  his  brother  planters ;  but  none 
of  his  numerous  descendants  had  sought  to  push 
their  fortune,  or  waste  their  substance  in  the  mother 
country.  Sound  judgment,  integrity,  and  public 
spirit  were  their  qualities,  accompanied  by  a  mod- 
esty that  withheld  them  from  display.  Judge  Weare 
was  a  friend  of  Governor  Wentworth,  and  in  the 
Provincial  Congress,  along  with  his  parish  minister, 
Paine  Wingate,  had  urged  moderation  when  Sulli- 
van and  Langdon  were  pressing  on  the  resistance 
to  British  aggression.  But  when  the  war  began,  no 
sturdier  patriot  was  found  than  this  quiet  country 
gentleman,  who  had  studied  law  to  qualify  himself 
for  the  bench,  but  relied  on  his  native  sagacity  and 
courage  to  carry  him  through  the  toils  of  state  ad- 
ministration. The  Committee  of  Safety  was  elected 
twice  a  year,  but  nobody  seems  to  have  proposed 
any  other  for  its  chairman  than  Weare ;  and  his 
hand  is  seen,  energetic  and  unshaken  by  danger 
and  difficulty,  in  all  the  measures  of  government. 
Like  Washington,  of  whom,  except  in  his  military 
character,  Weare  reminds  us,  he  never  seems  to 
have  been  depressed  by  ill  success,  or  too  much 
elated  by  victory.  At  the  close  of  the  war,  when 
governor  of  the  new  State,  under  the  title  of  Presi- 


280  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

dent  of  the  Council,  he  issued  a  Thanksgiving 
proclamation  from  Portsmouth  (November  2, 1784), 
in  which,  among  the  causes  for  gratitude  to  God, 
he  mentioned  these  :  — 

"  That  our  Supreme  and  All-Bountiful  Benefactor  has 
triumj^hed  over  our  unvvorthiness,  and  against  the  force 
of  all  our  ingratitude  hath  crowned  the  year  with  his 
goodness,  following  the  hlessing  of  Peace  with  that  of 
Plenty,  to  replace  the  expenditures  of  a  tedious  war ; 
that  he  has  so  far  succeeded  our  Trade  and  Commerce, 
and  heen  the  health  of  his  people's  countenance  and  their 
God  ;  that  he  has  wiped  off  all  traces  of  former  suhjec- 
tion  from  this  State,  by  establishing  a  new  Constitution 
of  Government,  in  which  our  liberties,  civil  and  sacred, 
are  amply  secured  ;  that  he  has  continued  the  lives  of  our 
Ambassadors  at  foreign  Courts,  and  is  giving  us  honor 
and  respectability  with  the  nations  of  the  earth." 

So  much  for  the  past ;  in  future  God  must  be 
prayed  "  to  bless  our  public  councils  with  wisdom 
and  unanimity,  diffuse  a  ti'ue  spirit  of  patriotism 
through  all  ranks  and  orders  of  men,  .  .  .  smile 
upon  our  Commerce,  Navigation  and  Fishery,  bless 
the  labors  of  the  laborer  in  every  department,  take 
the  interest  of  Education  and  Literature  under  his 
nurturing  hand,  and  fill  the  earth  with  the  Glory 
of  his  great  Name." 

This  may  serve  as  a  sample  of  his  later  style,  in 
which  are  reminiscences  of  a  theological  education. 
In  his  correspondence  and  speeches  he  was  simpler 
and  more  direct ;  in  all  his  policy  fair  and  earnest, 


THE   GREAT   AND   LITTLE   MEN  281 

yet  with  a  knowledge  of  human  nature  that  kept 
him  from  initiating-  or  carrying  out  injudicious 
measures,  however  strongly  urged  thereto.  His 
effective  peaceable  settlement  of  the  dispute  with 
Vermont,  which  had  led  to  the  secession  of  a  large 
part  of  the  western  townships,  and  their  temporary 
union  with  that  State,  is  sufficient  evidence  of  his 
wisdom  and  moderation.  His  freedom  from  per- 
sonal interest  and  ambition  is  testified  by  the  criti- 
cal Plumer,  who  wrote  in  his  sketch  of  Weare :  — 

"  He  was  not  a  theoretic  but  a  jDractical  statesman, 
distinguished  for  aniiableness,  uprightness  and  fidelity. 
From  tlie  Declaration  of  Independence  to  the  conclu- 
sion of  the  war  he  was  invested,  at  the  same  time,  with 
the  highest  offices,  legislative,  judicial  and  executive ; 
and  continued  in  them  by  annual  elections.  The  various 
important  offices  which  he  held  during  the  long  period  of 
forty-five  years  made  him  not  proud  or  haughty.  They 
did  not  change  his  mind,  manners  or  mode  of  living  ; 
his  old  mansion-house  remained  unpainted,  its  ancient 
furniture  was  still  used,  and  he  continued  to  the  last 
the  same  modest,  unassuming  man.  From  all  liis  offices, 
and  with  all  his  prudence,  he  added  not  a  cent  to  his 
property,  which  at  death  did  not  exceed  that  of  a  good 
common  farmer." 

* 
Probably  his  estate  was  diminished  by  his  public 

service,  and  the  outfit  of  his  ten  children  ;  for  it 
might  well  be  true  of  Judge  Weare  as  of  his  col- 
league in  the  Committee  of  Safety,  Judge  John 
Dudley,  who  told  Plumer  that  "according  to  an 


282  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

estimation  made  by  himself,  he  actually  lost  during 
the  Revolution  oue  half  of  his  property,"  Of  his 
person  we  have  no  portrait,  and  it  is  doubtful  if  he 
ever  allowed  one  to  be  painted  ;  but  the  tradition 
is  that  he  was  '"  tall,  slender,  and  commanding,  erect 
and  quick  of  movement,  with  a  bearing  of  quiet 
dignity  ;  affable  in  manner,  but  incisive  of  speech."  ^ 

^  The  house  of  Weare  was  one  of  the  first  that  as  a  child  was 
pointed  out  to  me,  and  then  remained  exactly  as  the  old  President 
had  left  it,  more  than  a  hundred  years  after  his  bride's  father, 
Samuel  Shaw,  had  built  it  for  the  young  couple  in  1737.  It  was 
noteworthy  among  houses  for  its  old-fashioned  wall-paper,  a  hunt- 
ing-scene, consisting  of  the  stag,  the  hounds,  and  the  huntsman, 
in  successive  compartments,  diagonally  above  one  another,  and  so 
repeated  throughout  the  room.  This  paper  had  been  put  on  in 
great  pieces  like  tapestry,  when  the  house  was  building,  and  was 
held  in  place  by  the  "  finish  "  above  the  old-fashioned  paneling. 
In  the  chamber  above  was  the  high-post  bedstead,  with  its  cur- 
tains of  checked  homespun  linen,  most  likely  spun  and  woven  in 
the  "  L  "  of  the  house  ;  and  in  the  bed  Washington  is  said  to  have 
slept,  when  visiting  New  Hampshire  for  the  first  time,  in  177i3. 
The  house  was  occupied,  until  1849,  by  Mrs.  Porter,  a  daughter  of 
President  Weare,  and  her  niece,  his  granddaughter.  Miss  Lang, 
•who  showed  me  the  rooms.  Of  the  sons  of  the  patriot,  one  was 
killed  in  the  French  war,  and  two  survived  their  father  :  Nathaniel, 
who  removed  to  Deerfield,  and  was  long  clerk  of  the  Rockingham 
Court,  and  Samuel,  a  justice  of  the  peace,  with  a  farm  adjoining 
that  of  my  grandfather,  two  miles  west  of  the  Weare  mansion. 
The  papers  of  the  family  have  long  been  scattered  and  some  of 
them  lost ;  the  public  papers  of  the  President  and  chief  justice 
are  preserved  in  the  records  of  the  State  and  the  courts,  and  many 
of  them  have  been  printed.  A  full  biogra])hy  of  the  Weare  family 
from  1()38,  when  the  first  Nathaniel  settled  in  Newbury,  till  the 
President's  death  in  1780,  is  much  to  be  desired.  The  emigrant 
ancestor  was  of  the  family  of  Weare  at  Wear-Gifl^ord  in  Devon- 
shire, and  the  first  chief  justice,  Nathaniel,  sealed  with  their  arms 
in  1700. 


THE   GREAT   AND   LITTLE   MEN  283 

His  public  life  began  as  "  moderator  "  of  town 
meetings  in  his  native  town,  which  then  included 
Seabrook,  where  his  grandfather  had  settled  in 
1662.  This  was  in  1739,  the  year  after  his  first 
marriage,  and  he  continued  to  be  chosen  to  this 
office  until  1769,  when,  having  taken  sides  in  a 
church  contest  about  the  location  of  a  new  meeting- 
house, he  declined,  as  moderator,  to  put  a  vote,  and 
was  never  afterwards  elected,  though  representing 
the  town  in  every  other  capacity.  The  State  elected 
him  unanimously  as  its  first  President  under  the 
Constitution  of  1783,  two  years  after  he  had  re- 
signed his  chief-justiceship  by  reason  of  age ;  he 
was  reelected  in  1785,  and  continued  to  act  as 
President  of  the  Council  after  his  infirmities  obliged 
him  to  call  them  together  at  his  own  house,  as  Pen- 
ning Wentworth  had  often  done.  He  died  Janu- 
ary 14,  1786,  and  was  buried  at  the  foot  of  his  hill, 
in  the  first  cemetery  of  the  parish,  and  hardly 
a  musket-shot  from  his  own  door.  Seventy  years 
after  his  death,  the  State  erected  a  marble  shaft, 
at  about  the  same  distance  in  front  of  his  mansion, 
as  a  monument  to  his  memory,  and  near  the  site 
of  the  first  meeting-house  where  he  worshiped,  and 
sometimes  had  preached. 

When  Weare  was  dying  at  Hampton  Falls,  only 
a  mile  away  from  the  large  farm  of  the  Pachelders, 
where  the  grandmother  of  the  child  was  born,  a 
dark-eyed  boy,  in  his  fifth  year,  was  playing  about 
the  door  of  his  father's  new   frame-house  "  in  a 


284  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

valley  at  a  bend  of  the  Merrimac,  a  few  miles  be- 
low the  head  of  that  river,"  in  the  present  town  of 
Franklin,  bnt  in  1786  still  a  ])art  of  what  had  been 
Bakerstown,  and  became  Salisbury.  This  child  was 
the  most  illustrious  of  all  the  men  of  Kew  Hamp- 
shire, —  Daniel  Webster ;  his  father  was  the  son 
of  Susanna  Bachelder  of  Hampton  Falls  (born  in 
1713),  the  granddaughter  of  Nathaniel  Bachel- 
der, who,  in  turn,  was  the  grandson  of  Stephen 
Bachiler,  the  founder  of  Hampton  and  the  ances- 
tor of  numberless  descendants  in  England  and 
New  England.^  Of  this  descent  Webster  was  proud, 
and  with  some  reason.  Writing  to  his  son  Fletcher, 
on  the  birth  of  a  grandson  (March,  1840),  the 
statesman,  then  in  the  national  Senate,  said:  — 

"  As  the  boy  has  dark  hair  and  eyes,  you  may  give 
him  my  name,  if  you  please.  I  believe  we  are  all  indebted 
to  my  father's  mother  for  a  large  portion  of  the  little 
sense  and  character  which  belong  to  ns.  Her  name 
was  Susanna  Bachelder ;  she  was  the  daughter  of  a  cler- 
gyman, and  a  woman  of  uncommon  strength  of  under- 

^  This  stalwart  Puritan  was  born  in  1561,  three  years  before 
Shakespeare,  educated  in  Laud's  College  at  Oxford  (St.  John's), 
before  Laud's  arbitrary  time,  and  ejected  from  his  living  in 
Wherwell  by  Lord  De  la  Warr,  in  the  early  reig-n  of  James  I,  for 
puritanic  opinions,  which  he  continued  to  maiut.ain  as  a  wandering' 
minister,  in  England  and  Holland,  until  he  sailed  for  New  England 
in  1632.  He  left  several  sons  in  England,  at  the  house  of  one  of 
whom,  Francis,  he  died  in  16(i0,  in  his  hundredth  year.  In  Amer- 
ica he  was  the  ancestor  of  all  the  Sanborns,  all  the  Wing's,  most  of 
the  Husseys,  and  a  great  many  of  his  own  name.  He  had  the 
merits  and  defects  of  his  time  and  his  class. 


THE   GREAT   AND   LITTLE  MEN  285 

standing.    If  I  had  had  many  boys,  I  should  have  called 
one  of  them  Bachelder." 

His  own  father,  Captain  Ebenezer  Webster, 
"favored  his  mother,"  as  they  then  said  in  the 
Province,  and  had  her  dark  complexion  and  glow- 
ing- black  eyes.  When  Daniel  Webster  had  seen 
many  men,  in  America  and  Europe,  he  still  said, 
"  My  father  was  the  handsomest  man  I  ever  saw, 
except  my  elder  brother,  Ezekiel ; "  and  the  tra- 
ditions bear  out  this  filial  estimate.  The  softer 
beauty  of  the  grandmother  was  reproduced  in  the 
orator  in  a  striking  masculine  form,  of  which  that 
grand  word-painter,  Carlyle,  after  seeing  Web- 
ster at  London,  in  1839,  wrote  to  his  friend  Em- 
erson :  — 

"  You  might  say  to  all  the  world  '  This  is  our  Yankee 
Englishman  ;  such  limbs  we  make  in  Yankee-land.'  As 
a  logic-fencer,  advocate  or  parliamentary  Hercules,  one 
would  incline  to  back  him  at  first  sight  against  all  the 
extant  world.  The  tanned  complexion  ;  that  amorphous 
crag-like  face  ;  the  dull  black  eyes  under  the  precijiice  of 
brows,  like  dull  anthracite  furnaces,  needing  only  to  be 
blown  ;  the  mastiff  mouth,  accurately  closed  ;  I  have  not 
traced  so  much  of  silent  Berserker  rage  (that  I  remem- 
ber of)  in  any  other  man.  '  I  guess  I  should  not  like  to 
be  your  nigger.'  " 

The  insight  of  Carlyle  was  not  at  fault  in  hinting 
a  certain  arbitrary  quality  in  this  well-endowed  ora- 
tor. At  the  age  of  thirty  or  thereabout,  while  living 
in  Portsmouth,  and  representing  that  part  of  the 


286  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

State  in  Congress,  Dr.  Goddard,  the  son-in-law  of 
Dr.  Samuel  Langdon,  who  had  taken  an  opposite 
direction  in  politics  from  Webster's,  told  Governor 
Plumer  that  the  young  Federalist  had  the  temper 
of  Kobespierre  !  In  the  way  Webster  had  chosen  to 
walk,  he  had  few  scruples  as  to  his  manner  of  deal- 
ing with  opponents.  Neither  then  nor  now  could  the 
New  Hampshire  bar  be  esteemed  a  nursery  of  fine 
manners ;  and  it  was  in  this  school  that  Webster 
was  trained,  after  graduating  at  Dartmouth  in  1801. 
He  had  prepared  for  college  in  part  at  Exeter,  under 
Dr.  Abbot ;  and  in  entering  the  academy,  he  was 
brought  from  Salisbury,  "  riding  double  "  behind 
his  father,  in  clothes  that  he  had  outgrown,  and 
with  rustic  manners  which  caused  him  mortification 
in  the  little  universe  of  Exeter.^  There,  as  every- 
where, he  interested  his  elders,  and  was  kindly 
encouraged  on  the  road  to  public  life  which  his 
father  had  chosen  for  him,  and  along  which  his  own 
ambition  urged  him.  But  his  father  was  too  poor, 
though  himself  a  public  man,  to  maintain  him  at 
Exeter,  and  after  a  few  months  there,  the  lad  left 
to  complete  his  preparation  for  Dartmouth  nearer 
home.  He  attracted  attention  in  college  by  his  mode 
of  declamation,  and  by  the  pronounced  originality 
of  his  character.^    Making  his  own  way  through  the 

^  Conversation  of  Miss  Clifford. 

^  A  slender  thread  connects  John  Lang'don,  the  patriot  and  suh- 
sequent  opponent  of  the  young-  Federalist,  with  Wehster  in  col- 
leg-e.  Ebenezer  Webster,  the  father,  had  borrowed  money  of  the 
wealthy  and  liberal  Langdon,  about  179(5;  in  1802,  when  Daniel 


THE  GREAT  AND  LITTLE  MEN  287 

study  of  law,  with  the  aid  of  his  elder  brother,  he 
soon  began  practice  in  the  rural  courts,  easily  im- 
pressed judges  and  counselors  with  his  mastery  of 
the  profession,  and  early  removed  to  Portsmouth, 

had  graduated  and  Ezekiel  was  in  college,  Judge  Webster  wrote 
to  "  the  Honr.  John  Langdon  ''  thus  :  — 

I  received  a  letter  dated  July  6  from  Esq.  Shannon,  in  -which 
he  says  that  you  want  the  money  I  owe  you,  or  the  note  renewed. 
I  mentioned  the  matter  to  you,  Sir,  at  Concord  in  June  last ;  told 
you  that  I  would  come  down  between  now  and  Fall,  and  have  the 
matter  settled.  You  may  depend  upon  it  that  your  demand  is  safe. 
The  reason  of  non-payment  is  my  educating  two  of  my  sons  in 
Dartmouth  College.  It  is  now  a  busy  time  of  the  year  for  farm- 
ers, and  I  think  the  Limitation  Act  cannot  affect  the  matter  at 
present.  And  if  Providence  spares  my  life  and  fortune,  you  shall 
be  satisfied  to  your  satisfaction. 

With  Esteem  I  remain  your  Friend  and  humble  Servant, 

Ebenezer  Webster. 

Apparently,  this  good  resolution  was  not  carried  out;  for  three 
years  later  (July  9,  1805)  Judge  Webster  writes  to  say :  "  It  will 
not  be  in  my  power  to  raise  the  money  at  the  August  Court,  unless 
I  sell  a  part  of  my  real  estate.  If  you  could  make  it  convenient 
to  wait  till  Fall  I  will  delay  no  longer  of  paying  you  to  your  sat- 
isfaction ;  for  at  that  time  I  have  a  considerable  sum  of  money 
due.  I  should  have  called  on  you  at  Concord  [Langdon  being  then 
Governor],  but  the  state  of  my  health  would  not  admit  of  it.  My 
Son,  the  bearer,  will  doubtless  make  some  further  statements." 

This  son  was  doubtless  Daniel,  who  in  the  winter  before  had 
refused  the  office  of  clerk  of  the  courts  in  his  native  county,  with 
a  salary  of  S1500,  which  would  have  paid  the  small  debts,  and 
made  his  father  comfortable  during  the  few  remaining  months  of 
his  life.  Daniel  made  his  first  speech  in  court  a  month  later,  in 
his  father's  presence.  In  1S02  he  was  at  the  Fryeburg  Academy, 
earning  money,  but  not  saving  it.  When  he  left  Portsmouth  in 
1S17,  his  debts  there,  unpaid,  amounted  to  thousands,  which  his 
Boston  friends  cheerfully  paid. 


288  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

the  commercial  capital  of  the  State,  in  1807.  He 
was  already  a  politician,  and  so  active  that,  five 
years  after,  he  was  sent  to  Congress  from  the  Ports- 
mouth disti'ict.  He  was  in  opposition  to  the  admin- 
istration of  Madison,  as  he  had  been  to  Jefferson's ; 
he  opposed  the  war  with  England,  and  was  one 
of  those  who  darkly  hinted  at  a  dissolution  of  the 
Union,  in  some  indefinite  time  "  when  a  small  and 
heated  majority,  contemptuously  disregarding  the 
interests,  and  perhaps  stopping  the  mouths  of  a 
large  and  respectable  minority,  shall  threaten  to 
destroy  essential  rights,  and  lay  waste  the  most 
important  interests."  He  meant  the  interests  of 
property,  which  he  always  sought  to  serve,  and 
which  led  him  into  his  worst  mistakes.  Property 
was  something  that  Webster  could  acquire,  but 
never  retain  ;  and  this  spendthrift  habit,  which 
showed  itself  in  the  provincial  parsimony  of  Ports- 
mouth, where  in  a  few  years  he  became  seriously 
in  debt,  was  increased  after  his  removal  to  Boston 
at  the  suggestion  of  powerful  financial  interests. 
From  that  time  forward  he  was  seldom  free  from 
the  obligations  of  debt,  nor  from  political  subser- 
viency to  the  interests  of  invested  wealth,  which 
his  career  as  a  statesman  frequently  manifested. 

But  his  powers  and  fame  as  an  orator  and  foren- 
sic pleader  rapidly  advanced.  In  the  House  of  Re- 
presentatives, though  among  the  younger  members, 
and  from  a  small  State,  he  soon  became  a  force  in 
opposition  to  the  administration  which  its  support- 


THE   GREAT  AND   LITTLE   MEN  289 

ers  dreaded  to  meet  in  argument.  Only  the  ablest 
of  his  contemporaries,  Clay  and  Calhoun,  were 
a  match  for  him  then  ;  and  they  became  by  turns 
his  allies  and  his  rivals  afterward.  In  the  Supreme 
Court,  especially  after  the  Dartmouth  College  deci- 
sion, he  became  one  of  the  most  powerful  pleaders, 
reinforcing  his  sound  knowledge  of  the  principles 
of  law  with  a  matchless  method  of  presenting  the 
strong  points  of  his  case.  Beyond  this  was  that 
resource  of  oratoric  genius,  an  appeal  to  the  imagi- 
nation and  the  emotions,  —  faculties  which  would 
seem  to  have  little  place  in  the  calm  balancing  of 
reasons  and  the  marshaling  of  law  precedents,  but 
which  more  than  once  turned  the  even  scale  of  jus- 
tice toward  his  side.  This  manifestation  of  innate 
genius  was  aided  for  many  years  by  the  unusual 
aspect  and  bearing  of  the  man,  which  made  him 
remarked  wherever  he  was  seen,  and  gave  a  charm 
to  his  utterances  that  captivated  audiences,  either 
of  the  many  or  the  few. 

In  the  powers  of  his  mind  the  masculine  under- 
standing held  the  first  place ;  of  the  higher  reason 
which  deals  with  ultimate  questions  he  had  less 
than  many  men  of  inferior  talents.  Thus  his  grasp 
of  principles  in  law  and  politics  was  firm  and  often 
profound  ;  but  in  philosophy  he  was  content  with 
the  traditional  and  accepted.  His  learning  was  not 
vast,  but  what  he  had  was  so  well  marshaled  as  to 
pass  for  more  than  its  intrinsic  worth.  His  glowing 
imagination  brought  him  within  the  ranges  of  liter- 


290  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

ature,  and  the  best  passages  in  his  orations,  while 
aiding  the  effect  of  his  contention  at  the  time  (as 
we  are  told  Burke's  did  not),  long  since  took  their 
place  in  the  literary  treasures  of  his  native  land. 
Much  as  he  was  indebted  to  the  accumulations  of 
English  law,  politics,  and  poetry,  he  yet  had  a 
genius  peculiar  to  New  England,  and  not  derived 
by  acquisition  from  the  mother  country.  Nay, 
beyond  this  he  was  endowed  with  that  mysterious 
attribute  which  we  specially  term  "  genius,"  and 
which  set  him  apart  from  all  New  England,  in  a 
class  by  himself.  It  was  this  that  his  countrymen 
felt,  but  could  not  understand  ;  they  propitiated 
him  with  gifts  and  honors,  but  they  could  never 
satisfy  a  deep  instinct  of  his  nature  which  he  could 
not  wholly  control,  and  which  made  him,  for  much 
of  his  life,  a  solitary  and  melancholy  man.  The 
defeats  of  his  political  ambition,  keenly  as  he  felt 
them,  affected  him  less  than  the  failure  of  his  inner 
life  to  reach  the  ideal  once  set  before  it.  Few  of  his 
critics  or  encomiasts  have  taken  note  of  this  mark 
of  his  high  calling,  and  its  persistent  frustration  in 
the  publicity  of  his  illustrious  career.  But  another 
man  of  a  genius  also  foreign  to  New  England  in  its 
manifestations,  the  elder  Hawthorne,  in  one  of  his 
New  Hampshire  tales,  has  well  expressed  it :  — 

"  Something  had  been  originally  left  out,  or  had  de- 
])arte(l.  And  therefore  the  marvellously  gifted  statesman 
had  always  a  weary  look  in  tlie  deep  caverns  of  his  eyes, 
as  of  a  child  that  has  outgrown  its  playthings,  or  a  man 


THE  GREAT  AND   LITTLE  MEN  291 

of  mighty  faculties  and  little  aims,  whose  life,  with  all 
its  high  performances,  was  vague  and  empty,  because  no 
high  pui'pose  had  endowed  it  with  reality."  ^ 

^  This  appeared  in  Hawthorne's  Great  Stone  Face,  written 
after  the  election  of  General  Taylor  as  President,  whose  alleg-ori- 
eal  shadow,  vanishing  into  the  wraith  of  his  antecedent,  Andrew 
Jackson,  also  figures  in  the  tale.  The  Face  is  the  "  Old  Man  of 
the  Mountain  "  in  the  Franconia  Notch.  N.  P.  Rogers,  the  New 
Hampshire  friend  of  Thoreau,  in  1846  was  writing  for  Horace 
Greeley's  Tribune  reminiscent  letters  signed  "  The  Old  Man  of 
the  Mountain."    In  one  of  them  (March  2S,  1846)  he  said :  — 

"  Daniel  Webster  used  to  come  to  court  in  Plymouth  when  he 
•was  a  young  lawyer.  He  and  his  brother  Zeke  used  to  come  to- 
gether  after  a  year  or  two.  I  can  see  them  now  driving  into  that 
little  village  in  their  bellows-top  chaise  (top  thrown  back),  driving 
like  Jehu,  the  chaise  bending  under  them  like  an  elm-top  in  a 
high  wind.  Daniel  was  a  black,  raven-haired  fellow,  with  an  eye 
as  black  as  death,  and  as  heavy  as  a  lion's,  —  a  heavy  look,  not 
sleepy,  but  as  if  he  did  n't  care  about  anything  that  was  going 
on  about  him.  They  say  the  lion  looks  so  when  he  is  quiet.  It 
wasn't  an  empty  look,  but  one  that  did  n't  seem  to  see  anything 
going  on  worth  his  while." 

Rogers  was  the  son  of  an  old  physician  of  Plymouth,  and  had 
himself  seen  what  he  here  described.  In  the  same  letter,  speak- 
ing of  Judge  Arthur  Livermore  of  Holderness,  before  whom  Web- 
ster often  tried  cases,  and  whose  father  had  been  chief  justice 
before  him,  Rogers  tells  this  story  :  — 

" '  It  is  laid  down  so-and-so  in  Coke,'  said  a  counsel  to  him  once 
in  an  argument.  '  Coke  was  an  arbitrary  man,'  said  the  judge  in 
reply.  '  But  a  Massachusetts  judge  of  some  standing.  Parsons, 
C.  J.,  was  of  the  same  opinion.'  '  Mr.  Parsons  was  a  great  adher- 
ent to  precedent,'  said  Judge  Livermore  ;  '  the  law  is  not  so  in 
New  Hampshire.'  He  would  decide  for  himself,  if  all  the  judges 
in  old  England  and  New  were  of  the  other  opinion." 

Another  anecdote  of  Livermore  in  Congress  (1817-23)  is  told 
by  Rogers. 

'■  They  sent  him  to  Congress  when  John  Randolph  was  there. 


2C2  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

In  the  outward  world,  where  he  publicly  moved, 
Webster's  purposes  were  high,  —  the  advancement 
of  his  section,  first,  and  then  of  the  whole  coun- 
try ;  the  maintenance  of  the  American  Union,  which 
he  had  once  vaguely  hinted  might  be  virtuously 
broken  ;  but  whicli  he  seemed,  in  his  latest  j-ears, 
determined  to  maintain  at  the  expense  of  most  of 
the  virtues.  His  highest  flight  of  eloquence  was 
his  panegyric  on  the  Union  in  his  reply  to  Hayne 
of  Carolina ;  and  next  to  that  was  his  praise  of 
sensitive  courage  in  the  colonists,  rising  up  against 
England  in  defense  of  Enolish  riohts.    He  said  :  — 

"On  a  question  of  principle,  while  actual  suffering 
was  yet  afar  off,  tliey  raised  tlieh-  flag  against  a  power 
to  which,  for  })urposes  of  foreign  conquest  and  subju- 
gation, Rome,  in  the  height  of  her  glory,  is  not  to  be 
compared  :  a  power  which  has  dotted  over  the  surface  of 
the  whole  globe  with  her  possessions  and  military  posts ; 

Randolph  thought  he  looked  too  stately  and  baronial  for  a 
Northerner,  and  would  make  him  aware  he  did  not  come  from 
Old  Virginia.  Livermore  had  made  a  few  remarks,  not  to  Ran- 
dolph's mind ;  he  got  up  and  said  in  the  Roanoke  vein  and  man- 
ner, '  The  gentleman  from  Verjuont  had  said  so-and-so,'  etc.  The 
House  felt  the  taunt  all  round,  —  all  but  Livermore,  who  quietly 
rose,  when  Randolph  had  done,  and  said,  'Mr.  Speaker,  I  respect 
the  opinions  of  the  gentleman  from  Rhode  Island,  but  must  differ 
from  him  in  this  instance,'  etc.  Randolph  put  on  his  fur  cap  and 
went  out  to  see  what  had  become  of  Jiiba  and  Syphax  ;  he  did 
not  mistake  Judge  Livermore's  State  after  that." 

Rogers  was  celebrated  by  Thoreau  in  liis  short  paper.  The  Her- 
ald of  Freedom,  a  weekly  journal  edited  at  Concord  by  Rogers 
for  a  dozen  years,  in  the  anti-slavery  cause. 


THE   GREAT   AND   LITTLE   MEN  293 

whose  morning  driini-beat,  following  the  sun  and  keep- 
ing company  with  the  hours,  circles  the  earth  with  one 
continuous  and  unbroken  strain  of  the  martial  airs  of 
England." 

It  was  a  great  service  to  perform,  —  Webster's 
demonstration  that  the  Union  was  a  nation  and 
not  a  mere  confederacy,  —  and  this  sober  argument, 
reinforced  by  the  graces  and  force  of  eloquence, 
became  the  faith  of  a  vast  majority  of  the  American 
people,  and  gave  strength  to  their  determination 
to  maintain  the  nation  when  it  was  assailed  by  the 
real  disunionists,  the  slave-masters  of  the  South. 
But  Webster  and  his  friends  were  apt  to  allege, 
for  twenty  or  thirty  years  before  the  Rebellion, 
that  the  small  band  of  abolitionists  were  the  for- 
midable enemies  of  the  Union  ;  and  when  a  consti- 
tutional party,  the  same  which  afterward  saved 
the  nation,  rose  up  to  resist  the  aggressions  of  the 
slave-masters,  Webster,  whose  principles  should 
have  made  him  one  of  them,  began  to  denounce 
them  as  hostile  to  the  Union.  Into  this  error  he 
was  led,  not  so  much  by  ambition  for  the  presi- 
dency, as  by  seeing  that  the  larger  interests  of  in- 
vested wealth  were  on  the  side  of  slavery.  He  had 
laid  it  down  in  one  of  his  earlier  orations  that  it  is 
"•  the  part  of  political  wisdom  to  found  govei-nment 
on  property,"  —  in  which,  as  he  meant  it,  he  was 
right ;  and  when  he  saw  a  large  part  of  the  ])ro- 
perty  of  the  country  apparently  on  the  side  of  the 
slave-masters,  he  forgot  the  maxims  he  had  used  to 


294  NEW  HA:MPSHIRE 

qualify  his  rather  offensive  statement  of  1820,  and 
went  over  to  the  side  of  the  few  property-holders 
against  the  many  small  proprietors.  The  Ameri- 
cans pecuniarily  interested  in  the  maintenance  of 
slavery,  in  1850,  did  not,  perhaps,  exceed  one  mil- 
lion out  of  three  and  twenty,  j^et  the  weight  of 
Webster's  name  and  influence  was  thrown  on  the 
side  of  the  one  against  the  two  and  twenty.  In 
theory  he  had  always  opposed  negro  slavery ;  in 
practice,  at  the  critical  moment,  he  was  found  up- 
holding it.  Love  for  the  Union  and  fears  for  its 
continuance  had  weight  with  him,  but  an  errone- 
ous weight.  The  real  enemy  of  the  nation  was 
negro  slavery,  as  was  amply  shown  by  Abraham 
Lincoln,  both  in  argTiment  and  in  fact.  The  safety 
of  the  nation  was  found  to  be  where  Lincoln  placed 
it,  in  his  Boston  letter  of  1859,  —  a  recurrence  to 
the  principles  of  1776,  as  expressed  by  Jefferson 
in  the  Declaration  of  IndeiDcndence. 

Except  as  a  leader  of  the  minority  party,  and 
occasionally  for  a  year  or  two  as  a  member  of  the 
national  cabinet,  Webster  had  little  to  do  with 
New  Hampshire  in  the  thirty-five  years  between 
his  removal  to  Boston  in  1817  and  his  death  at 
Marshfield  in  October,  1852,  at  the  age  of  seventy. 
At  no  time,  probably,  unless  in  that  very  last  year, 
could  he  have  secured  the  electoral  vote  for  Presi- 
dent in  his  native  State,  whose  inhabitants  he  had 
offended  by  his  action  in  the  Dartmouth  case,  and 
by  his  views  on  the  tariff  and  the  currency.    They 


THE   GREAT   AND   LITTLE   MEN  295 

had  a  pride  in  his  reputation,  but  a  dislike  for  his 
opinions.  He  retained  a  pleasing  memory  of  his 
native  region,  and  used  to  spend  some  part  of 
every  summer  there  ;  he  cherished  an  affection  for 
the  Academy  at  Exeter,  where  he  first  came  in 
friendly  contact  with  men  of  cultivation,  and  for 
the  little  college  where  he  was  educated,  —  a  lonely 
man,  even  then,  and  apart  from  those  of  his  own 
age.  He  is  now  the  most  eminent  of  all  those  born 
in  New  Hampshire,  and  his  statue,  with  those  of 
Stark  and  Hale,  stands  in  the  park  in  front  of 
the  Capitol  at  Concord,  where  his  father  helped 
to  ratify  that  Constitution  which  the  son  so  ably 
expounded  and  defended. 

To  a  younger  son  of  New  Hampshire,  Franklin 
Pierce,  the  State  has  never  been  willing  to  erect  a 
statue,  though  he  held  the  office  of  President,  to 
which  Webster,  Clay,  and  Calhoun  long  and  vainly 
aspired.  For  years,  in  his  younger  period,  he  was 
the  favorite  son  of  New  Hampshire;  represented 
her  in  the  House  and  the  Senate,  and  commanded 
a  few  of  her  soldiers  in  the  Mexican  War,  in  which 
Webster's  son  Edward  died.  Pierce  was  the  child 
of  a  Revolutionary  patriot  who  was  twice  Gov- 
ernor of  the  State ;  and  he  might  himself  have 
been  its  Governor  at  any  time  from  1835  to  1853, 
when  he  was  chosen  President.  He  had  graduated, 
along  with  Hawthorne  and  the  poet  Longfellow,  at 
the  Maine  College  of  Bowdoin,  and  easily  won  the 
place  in  New  Hampshire  which  was  denied  to  the 


296  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

larger  abilities  of  Webster.  He  was  socially  accom- 
plished, of  popular  manners,  a  well-read  and  suc- 
cessful lawyer,  but  neither  profound  nor  specially 
diligent  in  his  profession.  His  real  profession  was 
politics,  and  he  was  fortunate  in  the  circumstances 
of  his  political  life,  until  he  came  in  conflict  with 
that  awakened  moral  sense  of  the  North  which 
Garrison  and  Phillips  labored  so  many  years  to 
arouse,  and  which  was  unsparing  when  once  in  ac- 
tivity. His  State  gave  him  a  good  majority  when 
he  was  (rather  fortuitously)  made  the  Democratic 
candidate  for  President  in  the  summer  of  1852,  and 
his  friend  Hawthorne  wrote  his  "  campaign  biogra- 
phy." But  with  the  first  active  measures  of  his 
administration  for  the  protection  of  slavery,  and  its 
extension  into  Kansas,  New  Hampshire,  with  the 
rest  of  the  Northern  States,  turned  against  Pierce 
and  his  party ;  and  for  half  a  century,  with  rare 
exceptions,  the  State  has  been  out  of  the  hands  of 
those  who,  under  Pierce's  strict  "regency,"  gov- 
erned it  for  so  many  years.  He  left  the  ])residency 
with  a  bad  name  in  the  North,  and  with  few  real 
friends  at  the  South,  and  never  regained  that  influ- 
ence anywhere  to  which  his  talents  and  attractive 
manners  would  have  entitled  him,  had  he  not  taken 
the  wrong  side  in  the  great  controversy  that  fol- 
lowed. During  the  Civil  War  he  heightened  the 
aversion  toward  himself  by  presiding  at  a  public 
meeting  intended  to  influence  Lincoln  and  the  na- 
tional forces  to  make  a  premature  peace  ;  at  which 


THE   GREAT   AND   LITTLE   MEN  297 

his  friend  Hawthorne  loyally  sat  beside  him,  though 
taking"  no  other  part  iu  the  meeting.  He  survived 
the  war,  as  Hawthorne  did  not,  and  was  a  good 
friend  to  the  bereaved  family.  But  he  disappeared 
from  political  life,  though  living  entirely  in  New 
Hampshire,  where  he  died  in  18G9,  at  the  age  of 
sixty-fiv^e, 

A  more  virile  and  eloquent  statesman  was  John 
Parker  Hale,  whose  statue  also  adorns  the  Capitol 
Park  in  Concord.  Born  in  Strafford  County  in 
1806,  two  years  after  Pierce,  he  graduated  at  the 
same  college,  and  took  up  in  New  Hampshire  the 
same  profession  of  law  and  the  same  political  con- 
nection. With  the  approval  of  Pierce,  who  then 
controlled  the  Democratic  party  in  his  State,  he 
was  chosen  to  Congress  in  1843,  having  held  for 
seven  years  the  office  of  district  attorney  by  the 
appointment  of  Jackson  and  Van  Buren.  Follow- 
ing the  expressed  opinion  of  the  latter,  but  against 
what  had  become  the  policy  of  the  slave-masters, 
who  then  dominated  the  Democratic  party.  Hale 
in  1844-45  opposed  the  annexation  of  Texas,  as 
Webster  and  the  Northern  Whigs,  and  a  few  De- 
mocrats, also  did.  Pierce  and  the  party  leaders  in 
New  Hampshire  called  Hale  to  account,  and  re- 
fused to  support  him  for  reelection ;  but  a  consid- 
erable defection  from  the  Democrats  in  Strafford 
and  Rockingham  defeated  the  election  of  Hale's 
opponent,  and  the  seat  remained  vacant  until  Hale, 
in  1846,  was  chosen  senator  for  six  j^ears,  —  the 


298  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

first  distinctly  anti-slavery  senator  elected  and 
serving,  since  the  slave  question  became  a  national 
one.  In  the  Senate  he  had  to  endure,  for  years, 
the  serious  onset  and  the  sportive  taunts  of  the 
pro-slavery  majority,  among  whom  was  his  older 
compatriot.  General  Cass  of  Michigan,  a  native  of 
Exeter,  who  in  1848  was  the  defeated  Democratic 
candidate  for  President.  But  such  was  Hale's  readi- 
ness in  debate,  his  wit,  and  his  good  nature,  that,  in 
spite  of  his  opinions,  he  became  rather  a  favorite  in 
the  Senate,  as  he  ever  was  with  popular  audiences. 
At  the  end  of  his  term  he  was  not  reelected  ;  but  by 
a  reaction  following  the  unpopular  Nebraska  Bill 
of  Pierce's  administration,  Hale  was  again  sent  to 
the  Senate  for  four  years,  and  in  both  his  terms 
he  maintained  himself  well  and  secured  some  useful 
legislation.  On  the  election  of  Lincoln  in  1861, 
Hale  was  sent  minister  to  Spain,  where  he  was  of 
no  great  service,  and  could  take  little  part  in  the 
struggle  for  the  Union.  He  died  in  1873,  after  a 
long  illness.  For  a  dozen  years  no  anti-slavery 
politician  rendered  better  service  than  Hale,  and 
in  1852  he  was  the  candidate  of  the  voting  anti- 
slaverymen  for  President. 

Isaac  Hill  and  Levi  Woodbury  have  been  suffi- 
ciently mentioned,  and  it  here  suffices  merely  to 
name  those  illustrious  natives  of  New  Hampshire, 
Chief  Justice  Chase,  General  Cass,  and  Horace 
Greeley,  whose  mature  life  was  spent  elsewhere, 
and  whose  public  service  was  given  to  other  States. 


THE  GREAT  AND  LITTLE   MEN  299 

It  is  noteworthy  that  for  a  brief  period  in  1851- 
52,  six  of  the  most  active  statesmen  and  publicists 
of  the  nation,  Webster,  Cass,  Greeley,  Hale,  Chase, 
and  Pierce,  were  all  born  in  the  small  State  which 
gave  birth  to  Weare,  Stark,  and  Langdon,  and  for 
a  few  years  sheltered  the  genius  of  Rum  ford. 
Other  men  of  national  fame,  such  as  Henry  Wil- 
son, Senator  Grimes  of  Iowa,  John  Wentworth  of 
Illinois,  were  also  born  in  New  Hampshire. 


CHAPTER  XII 

THE    ANTI-SLAVERY    CONTEST    AND    ITS    RESULTS 

The  institution  of  slavery  never  had  a  sure  foot- 
hold in  New  Hampshire.  At  first  a  few  negroes 
may  have  come  in  from  the  West  Indies,  and  in 
due  time  a  few  Indian  captives  were  held  to  invol- 
untary service.  But  the  need  of  labor  was  supplied, 
for  the  first  century  and  a  half,  mainly  by  appren- 
tices and  ""  bound  "  servants,  the  latter  imported 
and  held  till  they  had  paid  the  importer  for  their 
passage-money,  clothing,  and  whatever  else  they 
did  not  pay  themselves  out  of  their  small  savings 
in  England,  Scotland,  or  Ireland,  from  which  they 
chiefly  came.  A  Venetian  sojourner  in  England  in 
the  time  of  Henry  VII  was  startled  at  the  custom 
of  the  people,  even  in  the  higher  ranks,  to  send  out 
their  children  as  apprentices,  or  pupils,  or  pages, 
to  be  brought  up  in  other  families  than  their  own. 
Something  of  this  custom  descended,  with  other 
old-world  traditions,  to  the  colonists  of  New  Hamp- 
shire ;  and  apprentices  of  both  sexes  were  taken 
into  families  to  learn  that  kind  of  labor  which  the 
head  of  the  family  followed.  Such  a  practice  dis- 
pensed with  the  need  of  slaves,  where  the  labor  of 


THE   ANTI-SLAYERY   CONTEST  301 

the  family  did  not  suffice  for  its  whole  service. 
Another  usage  was  to  "'  change  works,"  —  that  is, 
for  one  farmer  or  mechanic  to  help  another  in  his 
busiest  season,  the  loan  of  labor  to  be  returned  in 
kind. 

So  slight  was  the  hold  which  negro  slavery  had, 
that  the  system  silently  went  out  of  use  after  the  Re- 
volution, with  little  notice  taken.  During  the  war 
a  few  negroes  petitioned  the  state  government  for 
their  freedom,  offering  to  fight  the  better  against 
the  foreign  foe  if  their  request  were  granted. 
Probably  it  was  granted  in  some  cases  by  the  just 
owner  of  this  unjust  jDroperty  ;  in  other  cases  the 
nominal  tie  remained,  but  the  master  supported  the 
superannuated  slave,  rather  than  throw  the  cost 
upon  the  town  ;  while  thriftier  masters  emancipated 
the  wornout  serf,  rather  than  support  him.  Nor 
had  the  yeomanry  of  the  State  much  sympathy  with 
the  wealthy  slave-traders  of  Rhode  Island,  against 
whom  Webster  thundered  in  his  Plymouth  oration 
of  1820,  or  with  the  rich  slave-masters  of  the  South. 
When  the  first  agitation  to  check  the  extension 
of  slavery  came  that  year  (1820)  in  the  form  of  the 
Missouri  Compromise  debate,  the  representatives 
of  New  Hampshire  in  Congress  were  mostly  for  re- 
striction rather  than  compromise.  In  March,  1820, 
the  Portsmouth  Democrats  sent  that  able  Federal- 
ist, Jeremiah  Mason,  to  the  legislature  ;  he  was 
put  at  the  head  of  a  special  committee  on  the  ex- 
clusion of  slavery  from  Missouri ;  reported  in  favor 


302  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

of  it ;  and  wrote  this  resolve,  which  the  legislature 
almost  unanimously  passed,  as  indicating  the  opin- 
ion of  the  State  in  1820  :  "  That  in  the  opinion 
of  the  legislature  the  existence  of  slavery  within 
the  United  States  is  a  great  moral  as  well  as  politi- 
cal evil,  the  toleration  of  which  can  be  justified  by 
necessity  alone,  and  the  further  extension  ought  to 
be  prevented."  Both  parties  agreed  in  this,  and  it 
expressed  the  sentiment  of  Webster  then.  But  the 
political  alliance  formed  in  Jefferson's  time  between 
the  agricultural  democracy  of  the  North  and  the 
planting  aristocracy  of  the  South,  calling  them- 
selves "•  Democrats,"  gradually  brought  the  domi- 
nant Democratic  party  in  New  Hampshire  to  the 
virtual  defense  of  slavery,  as  a  form  of  society  pro- 
tected by  the  Constitution.  As  the  agitation  for 
immediate  emancipation,  begun  by  a  few  Quakers 
in  Ohio,  and  carried  on  more  polemically  by  Garri- 
son, attracted  notice,  the  New  Hampshire  Demo- 
crats began  to  denounce  and  persecute  the  aboli- 
tionists ;  not  so  much  from  love  of  slavery  as  from 
a  dread  of  political  mischief.  The  poet  Whittier, 
who  had  many  relatives  and  religious  associates  in 
New  Hampshire,  was  mobbed  there,  in  company 
with  the  English  abolitionist,  George  Thompson  ; 
while  the  more  fervid  and  wild-eyed  abolition  pro- 
phets, like  Stephen  Foster  and  Parker  Pillsbury, 
could  get  mobbed  anywhere,  and  enjoyed  it.  These 
were  New  Hampshire  men,  and  so  was  a  gentler 
spirit,    Nathaniel  P.   llogers,    friend    of  Thoreau, 


THE   ANTI-SLAVERY   CONTEST  303 

who  for  years  published  his  "Herald  of  Freedom" 
at  the  state  capital.  The  churches  in  New  Hamp- 
shire, as  elsewhere,  generally  opposed  the  agitation 
of  the  question,  but  occasionally  opened  their 
pulpits  to  abolitionists ;  and  on  one  such  occa- 
sion, the  anti-slavery  preacher  was  arrested,  while 
at  prayer,  by  a  Democratic  sheriff,  acting,  probably, 
at  the  suggestion  of  the  shei'iff's  cousin,  Moses 
Norris  of  Pittsfield,  a  party  leader,  congressman 
and  senator  afterward. ^  In  these  acts  of  legal  or 
illegal  violence  the  bulk  of  the  New  Hampshire  peo- 
j)le  took  no  part ;  they  abhorred  slavery  in  itself, 
and  were  ashamed  to  be  giving  it  this  tacit  support. 
As  in  the  revolt  against  the  Stuart  tyranny,  re- 
presented in  the  new  Province  by  the  courtier  Cran- 
field  and  the  roistering  Barefoot,  which  began  in 

^  The  abolitionists  did  not  fail  to  remind  the  Democrats  of  the 
inconsistency  of  their  support  of  slavery  with  their  democratic 
principle  of  "  equal  rights."  The  Anti -Slavery  Almanac  contained 
a  cut  of  the  poor  preacher,  dragged  from  his  knees  by  the  merci- 
less Reuben  Leavitt  (my  mother's  cousin)  ;  and  when  a  coalition 
of  Whigs  and  independent  Democrats  had  carried  the  state  election 
in  1846,  upon  the  issue  of  annexing  Texas,  Whittier  wrote  a  long 
satirical  poem  on  the  occasion,  under  the  alleged  form  of  a  letter 
from  Pierce,  afterward  President,  to  his  party  associate,  Moses 
Norris  (another  cousin  of  my  mother).    It  began  :  — 

"  'T  is  over,  Moses,  — all  is  lost ! 
I  hear  the  bells  a-ringing, 
Of  Pharaoh  and  his  Red  Sea  host 
I  hear  the  Free-Wills  singing." 

This  phrase  implied  that  the  "  Free-Will  Baptists  "  (a  sect  numer- 
ous in  the  State)  had  joined  the  anti-slavery  ranks,  which  was  true. 
Whittier  also  introduced  Leavitt  the  sheriff,  as  troubled  with  a 
vision  of  his  praying  victim. 


304  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

Portsmouth,  Exeter,  and  Hampton,  so  the  actual 
throwing  off  of  the  slave-masters'  yoke  was  first 
accomplished  there,  and  by  the  posterity  of  those 
early  planters.  The  motive  of  active  resistance  was 
not  solely  a  regard  for  the  slave,  or  an  affection 
for  his  enthusiastic  champions  of  the  Garrisouian 
school ;  it  was  rather  what  the  earlier  revolt  im- 
plied,—  an  unwillingness  to  be  governed  by  any 
but  themselves,  and  a  resentment  of  the  irregular 
ways  of  their  nominal  dictators.  The  counties  of 
Rockingham  and  Strafford  were  in  1843-45  repre- 
sented in  Congress  by  a  spirited  Democratic  lawyer, 
John  Parker  Hale  of  Dover,  who  had  been  made 
district  attorney  by  President  Jackson,  but  was  suc- 
ceeded in  that  federal  office  when  elected  to  Con- 
gress in  March,  1843,  by  Franklin  Pierce,  lately 
retired  from  the  Senate.  At  Washington  Hale  had 
voted  against  the  irregular  annexation  of  Texas  by 
Tyler,  the  accidental  President,  and  a  pro-slavery 
Congress,  and  he  had  addressed  a  letter  to  his 
constituents  explaining  his  action,  and  asking  their 
verdict.  He  had  already  been  regularly  renomi- 
nated by  his  party  ;  but  at  the  dictate  of  the  Demo- 
crats of  the  South,  who  had  just  elected  Polk  Pre- 
sident over  Henry  Clay,  Pierce,  the  party  leader  in 
Concord,  told  his  Democratic  friends  in  Rocking- 
ham they  must  "  throw  Hale  overboard,"  and  had 
another  man  put  on  the  ticket  in  his  place.  This 
offended  the  yeomanry  of  the  two  counties,  who 
had  shown  themselves  willing  to  be  led,  but  never 


THE   ANTI-SLAVERY   CONTEST  305 

to  be  driven.  Two  young  lawyers,  J.  L.  Hayes  of 
Portsmouth,  clerk  of  the  United  States  Court,  and 
Amos  Tuck  of  Exeter,  meeting  at  the  February 
term  in  Exeter,  conferred  together,  and  drew  up 
a  "  call  "  for  a  mass  convention  to  support  Hale  ; 
and  this  was  taken  in  hand  by  the  jurors  and  suit- 
ors at  the  court,  and  widely  circulated  for  signa- 
tures throughout  Rockingham,  among  Democrats. 
In  a  few  days  more  than  two  hundred  Democratic 
farmers,  merchants,  and  mechanics,  with  a  few 
clergymen  and  lawyers,  had  signed  the  call,  and 
the  meeting  took  place  on  Washington's  Birthday, 
in  the  same  church  at  Exeter  where  the  legislature 
had  resisted  the  mob  of  1786.  It  was  addressed  by 
Messrs.  Tuck  and  Hayes,  and  by  Professor  Hoyt 
of  the  Exeter  Academy,  afterward  Chancellor  of 
Washington  University  at  St.  Louis,  and  adopted 
resolutions  which  declared  :  — 

"  That  it  is  the  peculiar  duty  of  the  Democratic  party 
to  assert  at  all  times  the  principles  of  human  equality 
and  universal  justice,  which  form  the  basis  of  the  De- 
mocratic faith  ;  that  slavery  is  wholly  inconsistent  with 
those  doctrines,  and  an  institution  which  disgraces  our 
Republic  in  the  eyes  of  the  whole  civilized  world  ;  and 
that  the  nomination  of  another  candidate  for  Congress 
than  Mr.  Hale  is  wholly  uncalled  for  by  the  people." 

At  the  election  a  few  weeks  later,  the  candidate 
intruded  upon  the  voters  by  the  party  leaders  was 
defeated,  and  the  seat  kept  vacant  until,  two  years 
later,  Mr.  Tuck  himself  was  chosen,  —  Mr.  Hale  in 


306  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

the  interval  having  been  promoted  to  the  Senate. 
Upon  this  result,  quite -unexpected  by  the  abolition- 
ists, and  due  solely  to  a  spirit  of  independence  in 
the  Democratic  yeomanry,  Whittier  wrote  in  1845, 
in  a  more  serious  mood  than  the  year  following  (as 
quoted),  lines  of  which  these  are  the  best :  — 

"  God  bless  New  Hampshire  !  —  from  her  granite  peaks 
Once  more  the  voice  of  Stark  and  Langdon  speaks. 
Courag'e,  then,  Northern  hearts !    Be  firm,  be  true  ; 
What  one  brave  State  hath  done,  can  ye  not  also  do  ?  "  ^ 

^  Every  one  of  the  dozen  companions  of  Edward  Gove  in  his  de- 
monstration against  Craufield  in  1(583  was  represented  in  the  call 
for  this  Exeter  mass  meeting  by  descendants  ;  and  so  were  most 
of  those  who  in  l(55o  had  resisted  the  disfranchisement  of  Major 
Pike.  Peculiar  is  the  array  in  the  list  of  those  monosyllabic  Saxon 
names,  so  common  among  the  early  settlers  of  New  England,  — 
Blake,  Brown,  Cass,  Chase,  Clark,  Cram,  Dow,  Fogg,  French, 
Gale,  Gove,  Hook,  Hoit,  James,  Lane,  Moore,  Page,  Rowe,  Shaw, 
Towle,  Tuck,  Weare,  Weeks,  York.  The  more  learned  or  wealthy 
polysyllabic  names  were  represented  by  Bachelder,  Bartlett, 
Brackett,  Cilley,  Dudley,  Dearborn,  Emerson,  Greenleaf,  Osgood, 
Prescott,  Tappan,  Watson,  Wiggin,  Winslow,  etc.  Of  the  two  hun- 
dred and  thirty-three  signers,  at  least  one  hundred  were  cousins, 
more  or  less  distant,  of  the  present  writer,  who  well  remembers  the 
afFair,  and  the  excitement  it  occasioned.  Writing  the  next  year, 
when  the  anti-slavery  victory  was  more  complete,  Whittier,  in  the 
assumed  character  of  Pierce,  and  speaking  of  Charles  Atherton, 
then  senator,  said  :  — 

"  I  dreamed  tliat  Charley  took  his  bed, 
With  Hale  for  his  physician ; 
His  daily  dose  an  old  '  unread 

And  unreferred  '  petition  : 
There  Hayes  and  Tuck  as  nurses  sat, 

As  near  as  near  could  be,  Man  ; 
They  leeched  hiin  with  the  Democrat, 
And  blistered  with  the  Freeman." 

These  were  the  names  of  the  Concord  newspapers  which  were 


THE   ANTI-SLAVERY  CONTEST  307 

This  action  of  Democratic  New  Hampshire  was 
never  repented,  and  was  followed  ten  years  later 
by  the  organization  of  the  Republican  party,  upon 
essentially  the  same  basis  that  the  independent 
Democrats  of  the  pioneer  State  had  laid  down,  — 
hostility  to  slavery  extension,  and  a  refusal  to 
accept  the  slaveholders  as  political  dictators  of  a 
national  policy. 

When,  therefore,  the  intrepid  and  pugnacious 
Hale,  in  1845,  appealed  to  the  people  of  eastern 
New  Hampshire  to  support  him  in  his  revolt  against 
the  "  Concord  clique  "  headed  by  Pierce,  the  De- 
mocratic voters  responded  in  large  numbers.  In 
some  towns  half  the  voting  strength  of  the  party 
was  found  to  be  for  Hale  ;  and  so  fast  did  the 
movement  grow,  that  in  the  next  year  an  anti-slav- 
ery Whig  (Anthony  Colby),  a  leading  Baptist, 
was  chosen  governor  by  the  legislature,  which 
contained  enough  Whigs  and  independent  Demo- 
crats to  outvote  the  regular  Democrats.  Taking 
advantage  of  this  fact,  John  P.  Hale  and  Colonel 
Joseph  Cilley  ^  were  chosen  senators  in  Congress,  — 

anti-slavery,  —  the  Independent  Democrat,  edited  by  G.  G.  Fog-pr, 
afterward  minister  to  Switzerland,  and  the  Freeman,  conducted  in 
the  interest  of  Whittier's  voting  abolitionists,  the  "  Liberty  Party," 
which  had  defeated  Clay  in  1844,  by  voting  for  Mr.  Birney,  the 
Kentucky  emancipationist.  Atherton  had  been  peculiarly  insolent 
in  rejecting  anti-slavery  petitions. 

^  This  gentleman  was  of  the  family  of  the  Revolntionary  Gen- 
eral Cilley,  and  had  himself  been  wounded  in  a  battle  of  the  sec- 
ond English  war.   He  was  a  brother  of  Jonathan  Cilley,  Haw- 


308  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

the  latter  for  a  short  term,  and  Hale  for  six  j^ears. 
This  was  the  real  beginning-  of  the  Republican 
party  in  the  nation  ;  for  although  that  party  was 
not  named  until  1854,  and  not  fully  organized  till 
1856,  its  origin  and  princii)les  were  exactly  the 
same  that  had  been  reheai'sed  in  New  Hampshire 
in  1846.  Nor  has  the  anti-slavery  force  in  any  State 
been  better  organized  than  in  New  Hampshii-e, 
under  the  impulse  given  by  the  coalition  of  1846  ; 
although  the  agitation  of  1850-51  by  Clay,  Web- 
ster, and  their  associates,  to  maintain  the  Union  half 
free  and  half  slave,  —  as  Lincoln  said,  "  a  house 
divided  against  itself,"  —  did  temporarily  restore 
the  State  to  the  Democracy  under  Pierce,  with 
whom  Webster  finally  allied  himself,  after  failing 
miserably  of  the  presidential  nomination  in  1852. 
For  in  New  Hampshire  the  non-voting,  or  Garri- 
sonian  abolitionists  were  never  numerous,  though 
able  and  active,  and  the  better  elements  in  both 
the  Whig  and  Democratic  parties  came  readily  into 
the  new  crystallization  of  parties.  From  1847  the 
congressional  delegation  usually  had  a  strong  infu- 
sion of  anti-slavery  sentiment,  while  the  senators, 
after  1855,  were  all  anti-slavery  men,  cooperating 
with  Chase,  Seward,  and  Sumner  for  the  restriction 

thorne's  classmate,  who  was  killed  in  a  duel  at  Washington,  while 
a  congressman  from  Maine.  He  had  been  one  of  the  earliest  op- 
ponents of  slavery  in  New  Hampshire,  although  his  brother,  like 
Pierce,  who  was  in  Congress  at  the  same  time,  was  a  supporter 
of  the  pro-slavery  Democracy,  as  Norris  and  Charles  Gordon  Atli- 
erton  were. 


THE  ANTI-SLAVERY  CONTEST  309 

of  slavery.  The  resistance  made  by  the  Free-State 
pioneers  in  Kansas  (1855-58)  to  the  invasion  of 
the  Territory  by  Southern  slaveholders  and  "  Bor- 
der Ruffians  "  from  Missouri  was  popular  in  New- 
Pi  ampshi  re,  and  not  a  few  of  the  Kansas  settlers, 
in  those  disturbed  years,  were  of  New  Ilauipshire 
origin,  though  often  moving  into  Kansas  from  some 
State  farther  west,  to  which  they  had  first  migrated. 
The  stout  partisan  leader  in  Kansas,  James  Mont- 
gomery, though  not  born  in  New  Hampshire,  was 
the  grandson  of  two  soldiers  from  that  Province 
who  fought  at  Bunker  Hill,  and  his  great-grand- 
father, a  Scottish  Montgomery,  had  fought  for 
the  young  Chevalier  at  Culloden,  and  been  forced 
to  flee  to  the  Colonies.  This  Kansas  prelude  to  the 
Civil  War  temporarily  gave  New  Hampshire  a 
governor  belonging  to  neither  of  the  great  par- 
ties organized  in  1856  (Ralph  Metcalf),  but  who 
acted  with  the  Republicans ;  and  the  same  Kansas 
excitement  destroyed  the  popularity  of  President 
Pierce  in  the  State.  He  was  regarded  as  having 
taken  sides  with  Jefferson  Davis,  his  war  secre- 
tary, in  favor  of  the  slaveholder,  against  his  own 
people ;  and  from  the  odium  consequent  on  this 
he  never  recovered.  It  is  for  this  reason  that  the 
State  has  refused  to  commemorate  him  by  a  statue, 
though  his  portrait  at  full  length  hangs  in  the 
Capitol.^    In  the   division  among  the   Democrats, 

^  Those  who  came  near  the  good-natured  but  weak  President 
Pierce  at  the  time  say,  however,  that  he  made  an  honest  effort 


310  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

consequent  on  the  course  of  Senator  Douglas  in 
resisting  the  extreme  pro-slavery  policy  of  Presi- 
<lent  Buchanan  in  Kansas,  the  majority  of  the 
New  Hampshire  Democrats  followed  Douglas  ;  but 
General  Pierce  and  his  friends,  among  them  his 
attorney-general,  Gushing  of  Massachusetts,  op- 
posed Douglas,  and  retained  their  friendship  for 
Davis,  even  after  he  became  the  head  of  the  South- 
ern Confedei'acy.  Following  this  lead,  a  section  of 
their  party  in  New  Hampshire  violently  opposed  the 
subjugation  of  the  South,  in  the  early  years  of  the 
war,  and  considerably  embarrassed  the  Republicans 
and  war  Democrats  by  their  obstinacy  in  the  matter. 

Yet  the  little  State,  as  in  former  wars,  sent  her 
quotas  of  men  to  the  front,  and  as  the  contest 
lengthened  out,  put  thousands  of  men  in  the  field 
or  on  board  the  naval  fleets,  commanded  by  brave 
and  skillful  officers,  who  were  seldom  known  to 
retreat,  even  from  opposing  odds. 

Among  those  who  raised  and  commanded  regi- 
ments of  volunteers  for  the  war  were  a  nephew  of 
President  Pierce,  two  of  the  Congressmen,  Gilman 
Marston  and  Mason  Weare  Tappan,  T.  J.  Whip- 
to  send  out  capable  and  honest  Democratic  governors  to  Kansas, 
such  as  Geary  and  Walker,  of  Pennsylvania,  though  he  did  not 
sustain  them  against  the  clamors  of  the  slaveholders,  headed  hy 
Davis,  the  Secretary  of  War.  Both  Geary  and  Walker,  and  in 
the  interval,  Stanton,  an  acting  Governor  of  the  Territory,  got 
converted  from  the  administration  side  to  the  popular  cause  in 
these  long-continued  Kansas  troubles.  They  were  sooner  or  later 
removed,  because  they  did  not  sufficiently  favor  in  Kansas  the 
cause  of  negro  slavery. 


THE  ANTI-SLAVERY  CONTEST  311 

pie,  an  eccentric  officer  of  the  regular  army,  and 
others  who  distinguished  themselves  in  battle  or 
siege.  In  the  navj^  conspicuous  commanders  were 
Admiral  AYinslow  of  the  Kearsarge,  which  sunk 
the  corsair  Alabama ;  his  lieutenant,  Thornton, 
descended  from  Matthew  Thornton,  Admiral  Bel- 
knap, and  others.  In  spite  of  the  protest  of  leading 
Democrats  at  the  opening  of  the  war  against  rais- 
ing soldiers  and  voting  money,  the  state  govern- 
ment stood  firmly  by  President  Lincoln,  and  the 
people  became  more  strongly  of  the  Republican 
jDarty  than  before  the  war.  In  the  decisive  presi- 
dential campaign  of  1860,  New  Hampshire  had 
been  the  first  New  England  State  to  declare  for 
Lincoln  as  its  candidate,  and  the  active  secretary 
of  the  National  Republican  Committee  was  Mr. 
Fogg,  who  had  for  fourteen  years  conducted  the 
efficient  weekly  organ  of  the  original  independents, 
the  Concord  "  Democrat."  Upon  the  election  of 
Lincoln,  Mr.  Fogg,  who  had  accompanied  him  to 
Washington,  and  was  consulted  in  the  formation 
of  his  first  cabinet,  was  sent  minister  to  Switzer- 
land, while  his  leader,  J.  P.  Hale,  went  to  Spain, 
where  another  New  Hampshire  man,  Horatio  Peny 
of  Keene,  had  long  been  secretary  of  legation. 
The  two  men  were  found  incompatible  in  character, 
and  the  measures  of  Hale  were  thwarted  by  Perry, 
whose  long  residence  in  the  country,  and  his  mar- 
riage to  a  Spanish  poetess,  Carolina  Coronado, 
had  given  him  great  facilities  for  his  peculiar  course. 


312  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

After  the  assassination  of  Lincoln  in  1865,  New 
Hampshire  stood  loyally  by  the  administration  of 
Johnson,  his  successor,  until  he  showed  himself  a 
disturbing  force  in  the  pacification  of  the  South. 
Then  the  senators  and  representatives  of  the  State 
joined  as  heartily  in  his  impeachment,  and  the  two 
senators,  in  May,  1868,  voted  wnth  thirty-three 
others  for  his  conviction  upon  the  articles  offered 
by  the  House  of  Representatives  ;  while  nineteen 
other  senators,  just  enough  to  insure  acquittal, 
voted  in  the  negative.  A  few  of  the  New  Hamp- 
shire Kepublicans  took  sides  with  Johnson,  but  the 
majority  for  General  Grant,  as  his  successor,  was 
very  large,  in  the  election  of  that  year.  A  few 
years  later,  in  consequence  of  the  insult  to  Charles 
Sumner  of  Massachusetts  inflicted  by  the  Republi- 
can majority  in  the  Senate,  New  Hampshire,  where 
he  had  of  old  many  friends,  elected  a  Democratic 
Governor,  —  the  Republican  vote  falling  off  and 
the  Democratic  vote  gaining  from  that  circum- 
stance. In  the  presidential  election  of  1872,  imme- 
diately following,  the  unique  spectacle  was  seen  of 
one  native  of  the  State  (Horace  Greeley),  a  candi- 
date of  one  party  for  President,  and  another  native 
(Henry  Wilson),  candidate  for  Vice-President  on 
the  other  party  ticket,  headed  by  General  Grant. 
Wilson  was  triumphantly  successful  in  his  native 
State,  while  Greeley  failed  to  carry  it  by  a  minor- 
ity of  thousands.  In  the  vicissitudes  of  the  Recon- 
struction period,  which  lasted  for  more  than  ten 


THE  ANTI-SLAVERY  CONTEST  313 

yeax'S,  New  Hampshire  steadily  supported  the  mea- 
sures which  Sumner  and  Wilson  advocated,  and 
finally  carried,  including  suffrage  for  the  freedmen 
of  the  South,  and  the  perpetual  prohibition  of  hu- 
man slavei-y.  Since  1877,  when  the  questions  grow- 
ing out  of  the  Civil  War  were  practically  settled 
by  the  administration  of  President  Hayes,  new  is- 
sues have  arisen,  on  which  it  is  needless  to  dwell 
in  this  chapter.  Substantially  it  may  be  said  that 
all  which  the  independent  Democrats  maintained 
at  their  Exeter  meeting  of  February,  1845,  and 
more  than  all,  had  been  gained  a  generation  later. 
The  extension  of  slavery  ceased  with  the  annexa- 
tion of  Texas,  which  is  now  through  all  its  wide 
extent  a  free  State  ;  and  slavery  itself,  which  no 
one  then  expected  to  see  abolished  in  his  lifetime, 
is  gone,  not  only  from  our  country,  but  from  the 
West  Indies,  from  Brazil,  and  from  every  country 
even  nominally  Christian.  Inspired  by  our  exam- 
ple, Russia  has  freed  her  serfs,  and  one  sad  chapter 
of  human  miseries  has  been  apparently  closed.  It 
was  done  at  a  vast  expense  of  blood  and  treasure, 
of  which  New  Hampshire  paid  her  share.  Now 
other  chapters  of  man's  inhumanity  to  man  have 
been  opened  afresh,  and  New  Hampshire  is  not 
without  responsibility  for  the  misfortune ;  but  we 
may  well  rejoice  that  (as  Thoreau  said  in  his  eulogy 
on  his  friend,  John  Brown)  our  national  form  of 
slavery  is  no  more. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

NEW   HAMPSHIRE   IN  THE  TWENTIETH   CENTURY 

The  close  of  tlie  Civil  War  found  New  Hamp- 
shire very  deeply  in  debt.  She  had  mustered  in 
more  than  30,000  soldiers  and  sailors  during  the 
four  years ;  thousands  of  them  had  left  their  bones 
in  the  region  where  slavery  had  prevailed,  or  had 
reached  home  broken  in  health  and  incapable  of 
self-support  ;  a  few  had  deserted  their  colors 
and  taken  refuge  in  Canada,  or  remained  at  the 
South.  The  state  expenses,  which  in  the  year 
before  the  war  had  been  but  8175,000,  were  in  its 
last  year  nearly  $4,000,000  ;  while  the  taxes,  on 
a  diminished  population,  had  gone  up  from  less 
than  f  200,000  to  nearly  a  million.  The  state  debt, 
merely  nominal  before  the  war,  was  now  f  4,000,000, 
while  the  town  and  county  debts  were  nearly  thrice 
that  sum.  The  valuation  of  property  had  nominally 
increased,  because  of  the  inflation  and  depreciation 
of  the  currency,  but  the  actual  value  of  the  pro- 
perty was  less  than  in  1861.  All  this  might  seem 
to  betoken  adversity,  but  in  fact  the  increase  in 
the  earning  power  of  the  people  soon  made  good 
the  losses  of  property.    Farms  were  less  profitable 


IN   THE   TWP:NTIETH   CENTURY  315 

than  formerly,  but  manufacturing  industry  had 
gained  greatly,  and  the  throng  of  citizens  from 
other  States  and  countries  to  enjoy  a  few  months' 
rest  among  the  hills  was  every  year  growing  larger. 
In  1875  this  was  estimated  to  bring  into  the  State 
between  12,500,000  and  $3,000,000  yearly,  exclu- 
sive of  the  large  sum  paid  for  railway  travel  by 
the  pleasure-seekers.  Even  in  1862,  the  English 
novelist,  Anthony  TroUope,  said  that  the  White 
Mountain  district  "  contained  mountain  scenery  su- 
perior to  much  that  is  yearly  crowded  by  tourists 
in  Europe,  was  reached  with  ease  by  railways  and 
stage-coaches,  and  dotted  with  huge  hotels,  almost 
as  thickly  as  they  lie  in  Switzerland."  Since  then 
the  facilities  for  travel  and  residence  there,  and 
among  the  regions  of  the  lower  mountains  and  the 
attractive  lakes  and  river-banks  and  the  seashore 
resorts,  have  more  than  doubled.  This  summer 
population  has  extended  itself  into  earlier  and  later 
seasons,  and  there  is  even  a  considerable  resort  of 
visitors  during  the  severe  but  wholesome  winters. 
Consequently,  the  farms  are  less  frequently  aban- 
doned, and  when  this  happens,  they  are  often 
bought  by  residents  for  the  summer  and  autumn. 

Under  a  fluctuating  and  locally  variable  system 
of  valuation  for  local  taxation,  it  is  difficult  to  say 
what  is  the  actual  value  of  property  in  the  State  ; 
but  the  increase  since  the  Civil  War  may  be  indi- 
cated by  a  few  comparisons.  In  1864,  at  the  depth 
of  depression  made  by  the  war,  the  reported  valua- 


316  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

tion  was  only  $=129,856,167 ;  twenty  years  after, 
it  had  nearly  doubled,  —  $227,914,613.  In  the 
year  1900  it  appeared  rather  less,  —  $212,687,051, 
and  in  1902  was  $350,000  larger.  But  other  forms 
of  property,  not  subject  to  local  taxation,  such 
as  savings-bank  deposits,  railroad  and  insurance 
companies,  and  the  capital  of  banks  of  discount 
and  loan  companies,  had  much  increased,  while  the 
state  debt,  which  was  $4,000,000  at  the  end  of  the 
war,  had  fallen  to  $1,000,000.  The  town  and  county 
debts  still  exceed  $10,000,000,  and  the  total  of 
state  and  local  taxation  reaches  nearly  $5,000,000  ; 
the  state  expenses,  which  in  1860  were  less  than 
$180,000,  now  exceed  $400,000  annually.  The 
special  county  expenses  for  prisoners  and  the  poor 
are  large,  in  addition  to  what  the  State  pays  for 
those  classes,  — exceeding  $500,000  yearly.  The 
total  outlay  by  State,  counties,  and  towns  for  chari- 
ties and  correctional  services  must  exceed  $600,000 
annually,  and  the  outlay  in  private  charity  would 
bring  the  total  beyond  $1,000,000. 

These  figures  indicate,  what  is  well  known,  that 
the  system  of  public  and  private  charity  has  been 
much  extended  and  develo{)ed,  in  consequence  of 
the  great  change  from  a  rural  population,  inci- 
dentally engaged  in  small  manufactures,  to  a  pop- 
ulation more  devoted  to  the  great  manufactures, 
to  railroad  service,  and  the  care  of  large  estates. 
This  change  has  brought  into  New  Hampshire  a 
class  of  recent  immigrants  and  their  children,  fi-oui 


IN   THE   TWENTIETH   CENTURY  317 

several  European  countries  and  from  Canada,  whose 
families  make  larger  and  lar<jer  demands  on  the 
charity  of  the  public,  and  that  of  local  and  reli- 
gious societies.  Even  befoi-e  the  Civil  War,  this 
change  had  led  to  the  introduction  of  county  alms- 
houses and  the  limitation  of  ancient  pauper  settle- 
ments, instead  of  the  older  method  of  local  relief 
in  each  township.  But  at  that  time  not  more  than 
one  in  twenty  of  the  New  Hampshire  people  was 
foreign-born,  while  now  the  proportion  is  at  least 
one  in  four.  The  change  from  farming  to  manu- 
facturing industry  is  less  marked,  but  more  general. 
The  number  of  farms  reported  in  1850  and  in  1900 
was  nearly  the  same  (29,229  and  29,324),  but  the 
number  of  acres  had  increased  in  the  half-century 
more  than  200,000,  showing  there  were  more  great 
farms.  But  the  improved  acres  fell  from  2,251,488 
to  1,076,879,  —  showing  that  more  than  a  million 
acx-es,  cultivated  in  1850,  had  gone  back  to  pas- 
turage and  woodland  in  1900.  The  farm  property 
had  increased  in  value  about  29  percent.,  the  value 
of  farm  products  remaining  much  the  same.  But 
when  we  turn  to  the  manufactures,  a  great  increase 
is  seen  in  the  half-century.  The  capital  employed 
and  the  value  of  the  product  were  more  than  five 
times  as  much  in  1900  as  in  1850  ;  the  wages  paid 
were  between  four  and  five  times  as  much  ;  while 
the  average  number  of  wage-earners  grew  from 
27,092  to  72,612.  Manufacturing  has  thus  become 
the  leading  interest  of  the  State,  while  before  the 


318  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

war,  farming  was  much  the  foremost  interest.  It  is 
true  that  a  tenth  ])art  of  this  manufacturing  deals 
with  products  of  the  improved  or  unimproved  land 
in  the  farms,  and  employs  thousands  of  persons  in 
outdoor  labor  ;  but  the  greater  part  of  the  persons 
employed  are  in  large  factories  or  workshops,  and 
the  tendency  is  to  concentrate  them  in  cities  more 
and  more.  This  gives  the  matter  a  social  and  polit- 
ical importance  it  would  not  otherwise  have,  since 
it  establishes  a  conflict  of  interests  between  the 
cities  or  lai"ger  towns  and  the  scattered  population 
of  the  small  towns.  It  also  accumulates  the  people 
of  foreign  birth  and  parentage  in  a  comparatively 
small  number  of  municipalities,  and  throws  upon 
those  the  burdens  induced  by  illiterac}^  unsanitary 
habits,  and  religious  divisions,  from  which  the  ma- 
jority of  the  towns  are  measurably  free. 

Naturally,  the  persons  of  foreign  parentage, 
whether  born  abroad  or  in  the  State,  are  more 
likely  to  be  children  and  youth  than,  adults  and 
voting  citizens.  Thus,  of  110,895  persons  of  school 
age  in  New  Hampshire  in  1900,  52,676  were  of  for- 
eign parentage,  —  nearly  half.  But  of  the  voting- 
age,  out  of  130,648  men,  only  48,265,  or  a  little 
more  than  one  third,  were  of  foreign  parentage. 
Yet  of  these  9039  were  illiterate,  —  almost  one  in 
five ;  while  of  the  82,383  men  of  native  parentage, 
ouly  1256,  or  one  in  QQ,  were  illiterate.^ 

1  In  1820,  when  the  population  Avas  244,101,  the  occupations  of 
62,141  inhabitants  were  reported  ;  of  wlioiii  more  than  five  sixths 


IN  THE  TWENTIETH  CENTURY  319 

Among  the  whole  population  in  1900  (411,588), 
only   243,300    were    of    native    parentage,   while 

(52,384)  were  in  agriculture,  not  quite  one  seventh  (8699)  in  man- 
ufactures, and  a  little  more  than  one  sixtieth  (1058)  in  com- 
merce. Eighty  years  later,  the  population  having  increased  to 
411,588,  the  numher  of  occupations  reported  was  more  than  twice 
as  great  as  in  1820,  — of  whom  those  on  manufactures  were  more 
than  77,000,  including  owners  of  the  4671  establishments;  while, 
although  the  number  of  farms  had  much  increased  since  18-iO, 
only  about  50,000  were  engaged  in  agriculture.  This  includes, 
of  course,  many  of  those  persons  who  are  also  engaged  in  forestry 
and  lumbering ;  since  by  estimate  5200  square  miles,  out  of  9005 
of  the  land  surface,  are  said  to  be  in  woodland,  while  the  farms 
reported  are  only  5640  square  miles.  A  comparison  of  these 
figures  will  show  that  at  least  1500  square  miles  are  both  covered 
with  wood  and  included  in  the  farms.  The  forest  products  rated 
as  farm  products  are  not  given  in  the  census  tables,  but  must  have 
exceeded  *500,000,  or  an  average  of  !t^20  for  each  of  the  .80,000 
farms.  The  reported  "forest  products"  were  valued  in  1899  at 
about  $2,.300,000. 

In  the  first  census  taken  after  the  Civil  War,  the  whole  num- 
ber reported  in  occupations  was  120,568 ;  of  these,  the  number  in 
manufactures  was  46,533,  in  agriculture  46,573,  in  professional 
and  personal  service,  18,528,  in  trade  and  transportation,  8514. 
Here,  as  the  women  in  agriculture  reported  were  but  11,  it  is  plain 
that  the  number  4(3,573  is  too  small ;  since  every  farm  of  the 
29,642  counted,  must  have  had  at  least  one  woman,  by  average  ; 
while  of  the  personal  service  women  (9707),  at  least  1000  must 
have  been  domestics  on  farms.  It  is  therefore  probable  that  the 
real  aggregate  engaged  in  agriculture  was  not  less  than  77,000  out 
of  151,000  who  should  have  been  reported.  In  1900,  the  number 
reckoned  on  the  same  basis  was  perhaps  70,000,  —  the  farm  labor 
being  done  by  machinery  and  in  creameries,  etc.,  off  the  farms,  to 
a  much  greater  extent  than  thirty  years  before.  Probably,  then, 
out  of  some  200,000  whose  occupations  should  have  been  reported 
in  1900,  a  little  more  than  one  third  were  agricultural,  where, 
eighty  years  before,  five  sixths  were  so. 

In  the  valuation  and  debt  tables  of  General  Walker's  census 


320  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

168,290  were  either  foreign-born  (88,074)  or  of  for- 
eign parentage  born  here.  Thirty  years  before,  in 
a  popuhition  not  quite  100,000  less  (318,300),  the 
foreign-born  were  but  29,611,  and  those  of  foreign 
parentage  born  here,  44,592.  Thus  in  one  gener- 
ation the  foreign-born  in  New  Hampshire  have 
trebled,  and  those  of  foreign  parentage  consider- 
ably more  than  doubled,  —  from  72,203,  increasing 
to  168,290.  In  six  cities,  Berlin,  Concord,  Keene, 
Manchester,  Nashua,  and  Dovei",  where  manufac- 
tures are  the  leading  interest,  more  than  82,000  are 
of  foreign  parentage,  while  only  a  little  more  than 
49,000  are  of  native  stock. 

To  preserve  some  ratio  to  the  increase  of  nrban 
inhabitants,  and  yet  to  retain  political  power,  at 
least  nominally,  in  the  rural  towns  and  larger  vil- 
lages, the  State  Constitution  has  been  several  times 
slightly  amended,  and  provision  is  now  made  that 
the  additional  representation  due  to  increase  of 
population  shall  be  one  for  every  1 200  inhabitants ; 

of  1870,  the  New  Hampshire  figures  are  curious,  and  show  the 
influence  of  the  Civil  War  in  swelling  taxation  and  inflating  the 
currency.  He  estimated  the  "  true "  valuation  of  property  in 
the  State  at  $252,624,000.  as  against  $156,311,000  in  1860,  and 
$103,653,000  in  1850.  But  the  tax.ation,  general  and  local, 
■which  was  but  $1,261,866  in  1860,  had  swollen  to  $3,255,7(13  in 
1870 ;  and  the  public  debt  (very  small  before  the  war)  had  grown 
to  $11,153,373,  or  $35  joer  capita  for  every  man,  woman,  and  child  ; 
besides  their  share  of  the  national  debt,  whicli  was  then  $2,406,562, 
—  or  $7. 50  per  capita.  Tliat  New  Hampshire  has  reached  her 
present  prosperity  in  the  face  of  such  facts  shows  the  vigor  of  her 
people,  as  well  as  the  general  progress  of  the  nation. 


IN  THE  TWENTIETH   CENTURY  321 

while  every  town  or  ward  having  600  shall  have 
one  representative,  and  towns  of  smaller  size  shall 
be  represented  as  often  in  twelve  years  as  their 
population  bears  a  ratio  to  600.  Thus  a  town  of 
100  will  have  a  representative  once  in  six  years, 
and  one  of  500,  five  years  in  twelve. 

The  Senate  remains  fixed  at  twenty-four  mem- 
bers, and  the  Council  at  five.  As  an  additional 
check  on  illiteracy  in  the  mass  of  the  people,  the 
new  amendments  provide  for  reading  and  writing 
as  a  qualification  for  voting ;  and  it  will  be  lawful 
hereafter  to  tax  franchises  as  well  as  property.  A 
general  valuation  by  town  inventories  is  to  be  made 
every  five  years.  More  important  in  theory,  and 
perhaps  to  be  made  operative  in  practice,  is  a  new 
provision  denouncing  "  monopolies  and  conspira- 
cies which  tend  to  hinder  or  destroy  free  and  fair 
competition ; "  and  declaring  that  "  the  size  and 
functions  of  all  corporations  should  be  so  limited 
and  regulated  as  to  prohibit  fictitious  capitalization ; 
and  provisions  should  be  made  for  the  supervi- 
sion and  government  thereof." 

This  is  an  intimation  that  the  recent  control  of 
legislation  and  appointments  in  New  Hampshire, 
alleged  to  reside  in  a  single  corporation  (the  Bos- 
ton and  Maine  Railroad),  will  not  be  allowed  to 
grow  into  a  permanent  feature  of  the  government. 
It  is  a  significant  change  in  the  state  policy  that 
while  in  the  years  about  1840,  when  the  first  rail- 
roads were  building,  the  legislation  was  unfriendly. 


322  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

and  many  evils  were  predicted,  should  corporations 
succeed  in  establishing  themselves  i&rmly  in  Xew 
Hampshire,  now  the  legislation  and  administration 
have  for  many  years  been  favorable  to  corpora- 
tions of  all  kinds.  Some  of  the  evils  prophesied 
are  beginning  to  be  feared  again,  and  hence  the 
warninjj  sections  of  the  amended  Constitution. 

Another  great  change  has  occurred  regarding  the 
laws  to  regulate  the  sale  of  liquor.  New  Hampshire 
was  one  of  the  first  States  to  follow  the  example  of 
Maine  and  Massachusetts  in  enacting  prohibition 
of  such  sales,  except  for  medical  and  mechanical 
uses ;  and  the  strictness  of  these  laws  was  kept  up 
in  name  long  after  their  violation  was  frequent  in 
fact.  At  last,  after  a  referendum  vote  on  the  ques- 
tion, indicating  majorities  for  a  license  system,  such 
as  had  long  prevailed  before  1855,  the  legislature 
of  1902  passed  a  liberal  licensing  act,  which  is  now 
on  trial,  with  very  different  results  in  different 
communities.  It  will  bring  a  considerable  revenue, 
but  will  perhaps  be  accompanied,  as  a  like  system 
has  been  in  Massachusetts,  by  a  large  increase  in 
vice  and  crime. 

So  far  as  education  is  a  barrier  to  crime.  New 
Hampshire  may  be  said  to  be  now  better  protected 
than  ever.  The  teaching  of  children  in  the  com- 
mon schools  is  carried  farther  and  improved  in  its 
methods ;  while  the  higher  education  of  boys  and 
girls  is  endowed  and  promoted  much  better  than 
formerly.    Dartmouth  College  was  never  so  much 


IN  THE  TWENTIETH  CENTURY  323 

frequented  by  students  as  for  the  past  five  years, 
nor  ever  so  well  prepared  to  carry  on  their  instruc- 
tion. Technical  education  has  been  undertaken  by 
the  State  at  an  agricultural  college  in  Durham, 
endowed  by  a  wealthy  citizen  of  that  small  town  ; 
and  the  ancient  Academy  at  Exeter,  a  few  miles 
farther  south,  has  greatly  enlarged  its  buildings, 
resources,  and  number  of  students.  It  now  gives 
a  more  advanced  education  than  Dartmouth  did  in 
the  days  of  Webster,  Chase,  and  Choate,  and  to 
twice  as  many  young  men.  The  higher  education  of 
girls  is  provided  for  in  numerous  seminaries,  high 
schools,  and  academies  ;  many  of  the  older  schools 
of  that  name  having  now  been  opened  to  the  public 
as  local  high  schools.  Public  libraries,  also  a  won- 
derful aid  and  stimulus  to  education,  are  every- 
where gaining  both  in  number  and  excellence, 
maintained  as  public  gifts,  but  more  frequently 
owing  their  existence  to  private  endowment.  Of 
late  the  State  has  encouraged  the  formation  of  free 
libraries  by  a  small  grant  in  aid.  Their  whole 
number  at  last  accounts  was  230,  and  they  were 
established  in  225  cities  and  towns. 

The  average  length  of  the  school  year  in  days 
has  been  doubled  in  New  Hampshire  since  1870, 
being  then  but  70  days,  and  in  1902  140  days. 
The  expenditure  for  public  and  private  schools  has 
also  more  than  doubled,  being  less  than  $450,000 
in  1870,  and  now  more  than  $1,100,000.  The 
whole  enrollment  of  pupils  in  1902  was  78,793,  of 


324  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

whom  a  little  more  than  one  seventh  were  in  private 
schools.  The  estimated  value  of  all  the  public  school 
property  is  from  14,000,000  to  $;6,000,000,  and  if 
the  private  school  and  college  property  is  added, 
the  total  would  exceed  86,000,000.  The  State  it- 
self carries  on  the  education  of  its  blind,  deaf,  and 
feeble-minded  children,  chiefly  at  establishments 
in  Massachusetts ;  and  has  recently  cared  for  the 
maintenance  of  pauper  children  in  families  at  the 
expense  of  the  several  counties,  —  all  this  under 
the  direction  of  an  efficient  Board  of  State  Chari- 
ties. A  State  Conference  of  Charities  aids  in  this 
work. 

The  development  of  a  system  of  public  charities 
in  a  small  State,  that  till  forty  years  ago  was 
mainly  rural,  must  naturally  be  very  unlike  the 
same  in  States  of  dense  population  and  great 
wealth.  In  one  respect,  the  care  of  the  insane,  New 
Hampshire  has  been  well  abreast  of  the  advancing 
movement.  Its  one  hospital  for  the  treatment  of 
acute  cases  and  the  restraint  and  comfort  of  the 
chronic,  built  at  Concord  more  than  sixty  years 
since,  has  been  fortunate  in  the  skill,  experience, 
and  long  service  of  its  management.  It  still  enjoys 
the  services  of  a  veteran  trustee,  Mr.  Walker  (a 
descendant  of  the  founder  of  Rumford,  Kev.  Timo- 
thy Walker),  who  has  been  for  more  than  half  a 
century  in  office.  The  two  superintendents,  father 
and  son,  Drs.  J.  P.  and  C.  P.  Bancroft,  have  suc- 
cessively directed  its  medical  service  for  as  long  a 


IN   THE   TWENTIETH   CENTURY  325 

period,  and  have  added  to  its  wards  and  improved 
its  classification,  with  a  steady  regard  to  humanity 
and  good  sense  not  always  found  in  such  establish- 
ments, where  vague  theory  and  costly  experiment 
have  too  often  gone  hand  in  hand,  with  little  benefit 
to  the  patients  or  the  public. 

This  New  Hampshire  State  Hospital  was  origi- 
nally founded  by  the  donations  of  individuals  com- 
bining with  a  state  appropriation,  and  its  Board 
of  Trustees  then  contained  an  equal  number  repre- 
senting the  private  donors  and  the  State.  Recently 
the  private  donors  withdrew  from  the  board  at  the 
request  of  the  legislature,  with  the  privilege  of  with- 
drawing their  gifts  also ;  but  though  withdrawing 
from  representation  on  the  board,  they  chose  not  to 
remove  their  donations.  The  State  then  assumed 
entire  control  of  the  hospital,  as  well  as  exclusive 
ownership  of  the  property.  Somewhat  later  the 
whole  question  of  state  ownership  was  raised  by 
the  legislature  of  1899,  and  a  resolution  passed 
requesting  an  opinion  from  the  Supreme  Court, 
whether,  as  owner  of  the  hospital  and  its  funds, 
the  State's  title  is  a  fee  simple  or  "charged  with 
trust."  The  court  decided  that  the  State  possesses 
absolute  ownership  with  complete  control  of  the 
property. 

When  the  question  of  public  care  for  the  insane 
was  first  agitated,  seventy  years  ago,  an  impetus 
given  to  the  general  interest  by  the  activity  of 
many  benevolent  persons  in  different  counties  led 


326  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

to  considerable  private  donations,  which  have  been 
carefully  preserved.  The  income  from  this  source 
has  defrayed  the  expense  of  many  patients  with 
moderate  means,  who  would  otherwise  have  been 
objects  of  public  charity.  These  funds  now  amount 
to  ;J300,000.  It  is  certain  that  the  position  of  this 
State  Hospital  is  unique,  in  that  it  has  such  large 
funds  well  invested,  the  income  of  which  aids  those 
who  pay  all  they  can  toward  their  support,  rather 
than  become  wholly  a  public  charge. 

In  reviewing  the  history  of  this  hospital,  the  first 
of  the  distinctly  state  establishments  for  the  de- 
pendent classes  (the  State  Prison,  which  was  earlier 
organized  upon  a  sound  principle,  being  for  delin- 
quents), one  is  struck  with  the  early  and  constant 
interest  taken  in  its  foundation  and  management 
by  the  leading  citizens  of  the  State.  It  was  first 
recommended  by  Governor  Dinsmoor  in  1832, 
strongly  urged  for  years  by  the  leading  physicians 
and  professional  men,  and  actually  opened  in  1842, 
with  room  for  100  patients,  out  of  a  supposed 
insane  population  in  New  Hampshire  of  600.  On 
its  board  of  management  have  served  governors, 
senators,  and  congressmen,  and  for  a  time  Presi- 
dent Pierce,  before  he  was  chosen  to  the  presidency. 
It  has  pursued  a  steady  policy,  always  a  little  in 
advance  of  professional  opinion  in  the  country  at 
large,  and  has  secured  large  endowment  from  citi- 
zens of  the  State,  —  a  good  indication  of  its  high 
character.    At  present  it  has  room  for  some  500 


IN   THE   TWENTIETH   CENTURY  327 

patients,  in  buildings  much  less  costly  than  most 
of  such  hospitals,  and  yet  quite  equal  to  others  in 
comfort  and  classification  of  inmates.  It  has  only 
of  late  been  exclusively  a  state  establishment,  sub- 
ject to  the  vicissitudes  of  party  politics ;  but  its 
trustees  have  drawn  its  resources  from  private  citi- 
zens, from  towns,  counties,  and  the  State,  —  its 
receipts  from  the  taxpayers  being  now  between 
$50,000  and  160,000  a  year,  in  an  outlay  of  some 
$200,000.  This  has  relieved  it  from  the  embarrass- 
ing dependence  on  votes  of  the  legislature,  which 
often  restrict  the  efficiency  of  such  hospitals,  and 
may  yet  do  so  there  under  the  new  policy. 

There  can  be  no  strict  separation  between  the 
dependent  insane  and  the  mass  of  the  public  poor, 
for  of  all  the  causes  of  permanent  pauperism  in 
New  England,  insanity  is  one  of  the  largest  and 
most  constant.  The  poor  laws  of  New  Hampshire 
were  inherited  from  England,  but  modified  by  the 
needs  of  the  colonists,  and  at  first  left  the  support 
of  the  poor  wholly  to  the  towns.  Paupers  were  few 
during  the  first  two  centuries,  much  of  the  distress 
occurring  being  relieved  by  neighborly  aid  without 
the  stigma  of  pauperism  attaching  to  the  recipients. 
But  before  1843,  with  the  growth  of  manufactures 
inviting  a  foreign  immigration,  the  number  and  cost 
of  the  public  poor  began  to  increase,  showing  itself 
first  in  the  county  expenses  for  such  as  had  no  law- 
ful "  settlement "  in  any  town.  The  careful  and 
frugal  state  authorities  in  1843  required  a  return 


328  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

from  the  ten  counties  —  Belknap  and  Carroll  hav- 
ing been  recently  organized  —  for  the  five  years, 
1839-43,  of  the  county  cost  of  the  unsettled  poor ; 
and  it  appeared  that  in  1838-39  this  did  not  ex- 
ceed 810,000.  In  1842  it  had  grown  to  be  nearly 
f 30,000,  —  the  manufactui-ing  countj'^  of  Hillsbor- 
ough alone  expending  ^7000,  or  two  thirds  of  what 
the  whole  State  paid  a  few  years  earlier.  At  that 
time  (1842-43),  the  state  population  being  about 
300,000,  the  towns  did  not  pay  more  than  $80,000 
for  their  poor,  and  the  whole  cost  could  not  have 
exceeded  $120,000.  In  1902,  the  population  hav- 
ing reached  420,000,  the  towns  still  paid  $148,000 
for  outdoor  relief,  to  which  the  counties  added 
$61,000,  while  the  indoor  relief,  or  almshouse  cost, 
by  the  counties,  was  $135,000.  This  shows  a  total 
of  nearly  $350,000,  where  sixty  years  earlier  little 
more  than  a  third  had  sufficed  ;  and  by  that  time 
(1902)  at  least  half  the  public  poor  were  of  foreign 
parentage,  and  a  third  of  them  foreign-born.  Great 
differences  exist  among  the  counties  in  this  respect. 
Those  with  a  rural  population  have  fewer  indoor 
poor,  and  those  having  a  manufacturing  popula- 
tion (notably  Hillsborough)  have  many  poor,  and 
among  them  a  disproportionate  number  of  the  in- 
sane. Thus  in  1892  Hillsborough,  with  less  than 
300  inmates  of  its  new  and  well-built  county  alms- 
house at  Grasmere,  near  Manchester,  had  more  of 
the  foreign-born  than  of  natives,  and  more  than 
half   were   rated   either   insane  or  idiotic ;    while 


IN  THE   TWENTIETH   CENTURY  329 

Carroll,  in  the  mountain  region,  had  only  one  in 
nine  o£  foreign  birth,  and  less  than  one  in  three 
who  were  insane.  Of  the  foreign-born,  abont  two 
thirds  are  Irish,  one  fifth  Canadian  French,  and 
one  tenth  British.  Of  the  prison  jiopulation,  an 
average  of  less  than  500,  about  the  same  ratio  are 
Canadian,  but  the  other  foreign -born  are  less  in 
proportion. 

Intermediate  between  the  almshouses  and  the 
insane  hospital  and  prisons  are  three  other  estab- 
lishments, none  very  large,  —  the  Industrial  School 
at  Manchester,  founded  in  1855  for  young  offend- 
ers, male  and  female ;  the  Orphan  Asylum  at 
Franklin,  on  the  farm  of  Daniel  Webster  ;  and  the 
new  school  for  the  feeble-minded  at  Laconia,  con- 
taining in  all  three  less  than  500  children  and 
youths.  Only  the  first  and  last  are  maintained  by 
the  State,  the  Orphan  Asylum  being  mainly  sup- 
ported by  private  funds  and  the  income  of  gifts. 
Each  in  its  way,  these  are  excellent  establishments ; 
the  last  named  is  a  model  for  thorough  care  and 
sanitation,  combined  with  frugality,  and  the  other 
two  have  the  same  general  character. 

The  county  almshouses  (the  tenth  having  been 
rebuilt  since  it  burned  down)  have  not  had  the 
same  good  reputation  as  the  State  Charities  ;  but 
they  have  been  much  improved  in  the  past  ten 
years,  and  are  not  likely  to  fall  back  into  the 
condition  of  most  poorhouses  before  the  National 
Conference  of  Charities,  now  for  thirty  years  in 


330  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

existence,  raised  their  standard  in  the  nation  at 
large.  In  New  Hampshire  the  State  Conference  of 
Charities  has  done  much  to  remedy  the  neglects 
from  ignorance,  and  a  few  abuses.  The  character 
of  the  peojile  is  fundamentally  charitable,  and  a 
guaranty  against  serious  mismanagement. 

In  penitentiary  discipline,  New  Hampshire  was 
one  of  the  first  States  to  adopt  modern  ideas,  under 
the  direction  of  the  Pilsbury  family,  who  for  three 
generations  managed  prisons  on  the  Auburn  plan 
in  Connecticut  and  New  York,  as  well  as  in  their 
native  State.  It  was  the  most  eminent  of  these  dis- 
ciplinarians, Amos  Pilsbury,  who  trained  in  his 
youth  that  man  of  genius,  Mr.  Brockway  of  Con- 
necticut, to  whom  the  world  owes  the  most  effective 
system  for  young  felons  now  in  use  at  Elmira  and 
other  reformatory  prisons.  The  small  State  Prison 
at  Concord  no  longer  stands  in  the  front  rank,  yet 
is  of  fair  reputation,  and  a  useful  adjunct  to  the 
correctional  system  of  county  prisons.  A  work- 
house for  misdemeanants  is  much  needed  for  those 
now  sentenced  to  almshouses.  The  yearly  cost  of 
the  prison  system  may  be  estimated  at  $60,000. 
The  judiciary  of  the  State  stood  high  when  its  jus- 
tices were  country  gentlemen  and  clergymen,  for 
the  most  part ;  it  rose  to  eminence  in  its  decisions, 
when  the  great  lawyers  of  the  older  counties.  Mason, 
Plumer,  Livermore,  Smith,  Webster,  Sullivan, 
Woodbury,  Richardson,  etc.,  adorned  the  bar  and 
bench,  before  1830.    It   has  well   maintained   its 


IN  THE  TWENTIETH  CENTURY  331 

standard  since,  but  not  relatively,  perhaps,  though 
its  decisions  have  seldom  been  overruled  since  the 
Dartmouth  College  case  in  1817.  In  one  marked 
instance,  twenty-five  years  later,  the  state  court 
declined  to  modify  its  decision  when  reversed  by 
the  national  Supreme  Court,  and  that  august  body 
afterward  took  the  New  Hampshire  view  of  the 
case,  when  Judge  Woodbury  had  succeeded  to 
Story's  place  on  the  bench. 

Whether  the  influence  of  wealth,  aggregated  in 
railroads  and  other  corporations,  has  affected  the 
judiciary  in  New  Hampshire,  as  it  occasionally  does 
in  Vermont  and  New  York,  is  a  question  ;  but  there 
can  be  no  doubt  that  the  State  has  suffered  in  its 
political  morals  by  the  growth  of  corporations.  The 
governors  in  1840-45  were  wise  in  their  warn- 
ings against  endowing  such  aggregations  of  wealth 
with  peculiar  privileges,  not  gi*auted  to  partnerships 
or  individuals.  Governor  Hubbard,  an  eminent 
lawyer,  and  originally  a  Federalist,  in  his  addresses 
to  the  legislature  (1842-43),  expressed  opinions 
too  little  regarded  of  late,  even  in  communities 
where  property  is  distributed  so  equally  as  it  has 
been  in  New  Hampshire  and  Vermont.    He  said  :  — 

"  The  great  design  in  the  constitution  of  free  political 
communities  is,  to  protect  the  weak  from  the  encroach- 
ments of  the  strong ;  to  defend  the  impotent  from  the 
influence  of  power,  and  to  sustain  the  whole  people  in 
the  enjoyment  of  their  liberty  and  equality.  The  prin- 
ciple that  individual  property  shall  not  be  taken,  except 


332  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

for  public  use,  is,  in  a  republic,  the  surest  guaranty  of 
individual  independence.  The  tendency  of  our  legislation 
is  to  disregard  individual  rights.  The  authority  to  estab- 
lish private  corporations  cannot  give  to  the  representa- 
tive body  of  the  people  any  new  power  over  the  private 
rights  of  Individuals.  Highways  are  the  work  of  public 
corporations,  and  are  wholly  distinguishable,  in  their 
character,  use,  and  purpose,  from  ways  wrought  by  indi- 
viduals or  private  corpoi'ations.  These  are  constructed 
for  private  benefit,  with  private  means  ;  of  this  descrip- 
tion are  the  railroads.  The  public  are  shut  out  from  a 
participation  in  their  government  and  direction.  Upon 
such  a  corporation  power  cannot  be  conferred  to  take 
individual  property  for  its  use  without  the  owner's  con- 
sent." 

This  exact  issue,  being  raised  in  Governor  Hub- 
bard's time,  was  then  decided  in  accordance  with 
his  view  ;  but  now  other  doctrines  seem  to  prevail 
for  what  are  called  "  semi-public "  corporations, 
like  railroads,  whether  for  steam  or  electric  loco- 
motion. And  it  has  been  found  that,  though  the 
public  may  be  "  shut  out  from  participation  in  the 
direction  of  railroads,"  railroads  are  not  shut  out 
from  the  direction  of  government.  They  have  had 
too  much  influence  for  thirty  years  in  aiding  or 
thwarting  the  political  fortunes  of  the  ambitious ; 
and  they  seem  to  have  taken  advantage  of  the  grow- 
ing evil  of  vote-buying,  to  influence  the  choice  of 
legislators  and  their  action  when  chosen.  A  percep- 
tion of  this  doubtless  gave  occasion  for  an  amend- 


IN   THE   TWENTIETH   CENTURY  333 

ment  to  the  State  Constitution  adopted  in  1903. 
In  the  years  of  Governor  Steele,  who  followed 
Hubbard  (1844-45),  he  expressed  similar  opinions 
more  pointedly.  He  was  a  "  poor  white "  from 
North  Carolina,  who  had  migrated  to  Peterbor- 
ough, and  by  his  mechanic  skill  and  financial  fac- 
ulty made  himself  independent  in  fortune,  as  he 
naturally  was  in  mind.  When  governor  he  said 
(1844):  — 

"  I  know  of  no  valid  reason  why  associated  wealth  in 
any  form  should  enjoy  by  law  privileges  or  exemptions 
which  are  denied  to  partnerships  or  individuals." 

(1845.)  ''The  granting  to  combined  wealth  of  exclusive 
privileges  or  immunities  would,  ere  long,  raise  the  gran- 
tees above  the  grantors  ;  and  corporate  bodies  would  soon 
usurp  the  power,  without  possessing  the  dignity  or  per- 
sonal responsibility  of  the  landed  and  titled  aristocracy 
of  Europe.  .  .  .  Grant  protection  to  all  who  ask  it,  and 
in  the  end  many  sections  of  our  country,  if  not  all,  will 
present  the  sad  spectacle  of  inordinate  wealth  on  the  one 
hand,  and  squalid  poverty  on  the  other,  —  of  a  people 
bought  with  and  scrawhling  after  their  own  vioney  : 
a  Congress  changed  into  a  hoard  of  assessors,  and  the 
Executive  Department  presided  over  by  the  man  who 
promises  most  to  his  own  supporters." 

There  are  many  who  think  that  we  have  already 
attained  the  position  thus  depicted  by  this  demo- 
cratic moralist.  He  was  then  considering  the  exist- 
ing tariff,  which  was  but  moderate  in  its  taxation 
of  the  consumer  for  the  enrichment  of  the  manu- 


334  NEW   HAMPSHIRE 

facturer,  compared  with  the  rates  now  existing. 
These  rates  New  Hampshire  before  the  Civil  War 
would  have  resisted  by  great  majorities ;  now  she 
seems  to  favor  them. 

No  doubt  the  disproportion  between  wealth  and 
poverty  in  the  State  increases,  not  only  among  those 
resident  the  whole  year,  but  among  the  rich  families 
from  other  States  (who  buy  large  tracts  and  reside 
on  some  corner  of  them  for  a  few  months  in  the 
summer)  and  their  laborers  and  dependents.  One 
such  estate,  of  enormous  extent  for  New  Hamp- 
shire, exists  on  the  borders  of  Sullivan  and  Grafton 
counties,  devoted  to  a  park  for  beasts  of  the  chase. 
It  was  purchased  about  1870  by  the  late  Austin 
Corbin  of  New  York,  contains  25,000  acres,  and 
has  cost  half  a  million.  Among  its  wild  denizens 
are  150  buffaloes,  300  wild  boars,  twenty  or  thirty 
moose,  and  thousands  of  smaller  beasts  and  birds ; 
while  a  few  families  of  men  and  women  care  for 
the  interests  involved.  As  a  museum  of  natural 
history  and  a  forest  preserve,  this  adds  to  the  at- 
tractions of  the  State.  Other  tracts  of  less  extent, 
but  still  large,  are  owned  by  rich  men  or  by  com- 
panies for  the  supply  of  wood-paper,  or  other  uses 
of  the  timbered  regions  in  the  mountain  district. 
In  the  wood-pulp  manufacture  alone,  twenty  propri- 
etors (firms  or  individuals)  have  29  establishments, 
with  a  capital  valued  at  more  than  $8,000,000  and 
employing  nearly  2500  men  and  women,  whose 
annual  product  exceeds  -11,250,000.    Including  this 


IN   THE   TWENTIETH   CENTURY  335 

new  interest,  the  whole  value  of  the  timber  and 
wood-working  capital  is  $20,000,000,  vested  in 
5800  establishments,  great  and  small,  and  employ- 
ing 6600  hands,  chiefly  men.  The  annual  product 
of  this  varied  industry  is  placed  at  $17,000,000, 
or  nearly  as  much  as  the  capital  invested,  which 
capital  has  increased  by  ten  millions  in  twelve 
years.  Impelled  by  this  growing  exploitation  of 
the  forests,  the  State  has  created  an  intelligent 
forestry  commission,  whose  report  indicates  what  is 
doing  to  destroy,  and  what  may  be  done  to  preserve, 
this  ornament  and  treasure  of  New  Hampshire.  Its 
first  report  declares  that  the  area  in  the  State  now 
covered  with  foliage,  including  much  that  has  no 
present  value,  is  larger  than  at  any  time  since  1850  ; 
and  that,  though  valuable  timber  and  fuel  have 
been  cut  off  and  many  forest  fires  occur,  there  has 
been  no  perceptible  decrease  of  rainfall,  or  loss  of 
water  power,  —  the  latter  being  the  greatest  single 
resource  of  New  Hampshire,  especially  since  the 
applications  of  electricity  to  industry.  This  is  more 
encouraging  than  there  was  reason  to  expect,  and 
the  measures  proposed  to  reforest  the  denuded 
regions  will  perhaps  keep  good  this  condition. 

It  is  shown  that  the  capital  invested  in  "  summer 
property  "  (hotels,  boarding-houses,  pleasure-boats, 
and  carriages,  etc.)  is  but  little  greater  than  in  the 
wood-pulp  industry,  though  employing  many  more 
persons,  and  providing  for  175,000  guests  in  an  aver- 
age year.    Out  of  235  towns  in  the  State,  204  share 


336  NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

in  this  interest.  With  a  capital  of  110,500,000, 
it  pays  $540,000  in  wages  to  12,350  persons,  and 
furnishes  a  gross  income  to  railroads  atid  trans- 
portation companies  of  more  than  $700,000.  Its 
own  gross  income  approaches  $7,000,000,  and  in- 
creases in  magnitude  each  decade.  The  connection 
between  it  and  the  railroad  corporations,  particu'- 
larly  the  Boston  and  Maine,  gives  popular  strength 
to  them  and  to  similar  investments  of  wealth.  The 
state  government  for  some  years  past  has  aided  the 
influx  of  summer  guests  by  building  state  high- 
ways and  protecting  the  public  rights,  in  lakes  and 
streams  for  fishing,  against  the  encroachments  of 
private  owners. 

Altogether,  it  may  be  said  that  the  material  inter- 
ests of  New  Hampshire,  and  its  higher  civilization, 
as  shown  in  education,  charity,  and  the  encourage- 
ment of  literature,  were  never  more  prosperous  or 
advancing  than  now.  Its  moral  interests  are  some- 
what imj)eriled  by  the  influence  of  unscrupulous 
wealth  and  irresponsible  poverty,  developing  a  pro- 
letariat in  the  place  of  that  historical  yeomanry, 
whose  possession  of  landed  property  gave  assurance 
that  government  would  not  get  beyond  the  control 
of  families  who  had,  as  their  ancestors  used  to  say, 
"  a  stake  in  the  country."  The  scale  of  political 
rectitude  in  state  affairs  has  been  lowered,  and  the 
purchase  of  voters,  which  fifty  years  ago  was  almost 
unknown,  is  now  alleged  to  be  a  general  custom. 
Coincident  with  this,  the  eminence  of  men  at  the 


IN   THE   TWENTIETH   CENTURY  337 

head  of  the  government,  of  congressmen  and  sena- 
tors and  leaders  in  the  legislature,  is  less  note- 
worthy than  in  the  first  half  of  the  last  century,  — 
a  fact  illustrated  by  the  admirable  collection  of 
portraits  at  Concord,  in  which  New  Hampshire  ex- 
cels most  of  the  States.  No  men  of  such  mark  as 
Langdon,  Plumer,  and  Woodbury  have  lately  been 
governors ;  no  senators  have  equaled  Mason, 
Pierce,  and  Hale ;  few  congressmen  have  ranked 
with  Webster,  Bell,  Atherton,  Norris,  Tuck,  and 
Wilson.  The  naive  remark  of  a  country  member 
to  John  Langdon,  when  the  courtly  governor,  in 
1810,  was  telling  the  legislative  committee  that  "  he 
distrusted  his  own  ability  to  perform  the  high  duties 
of  the  office,"  has  more  than  once  been  strictly 
verified,  "  O  Governor,"  said  the  encouraging 
rustic,  "  don't  be  afraid  !  it  does  n't  take  much  of  a 
man  to  govern  New  Hampshire." 

Yet  in  the  vigor  of  its  soldiers,  the  enterprise  of 
its  men  of  affairs,  and  the  active  genius  of  its  whole 
population,  seeking  fields  of  activity  in  other  States 
and  countries,  New  Hampshire  is  as  marked  as 
ever.  Its  institutions,  if  threatened  by  the  sordid 
spirit  of  a  too  commercial  age,  are  still  supported 
by  a  courage  and  independence  in  the  mass  of  the 
people,  such  as  threw  off  the  yoke  of  the  Stuarts  in 
the  seventeenth,  and  of  King  George  in  the  eight- 
eenth century.  That  sturdy  compound  of  English 
obstinacy,  Scotch  pugnacity,  and  Irish  ingenuity, 
which  carried  the  Colony,  the  Province,  and  the 


338  NEW  HA31PSHIRE 

youthful  State  through  its  perils  by  land  and  sea, 
and  among  false  brethren,  yet  makes  the  founda- 
tion of  its  community  ;  and  self-reliance,  forged  and 
tested  in  the  wars  and  toils  of  three  centuries,  is  the 
lasting  fibre  of  its  individual  character. 


INDEX 


INDEX 


Abbot,  Dr.  Benjamin,  242. 

Abeimki  ludiaus,  document  of,  137  ; 
raids  of,  iu  New  Haiupsliire,  138, 
140;  treaty  with,  140. 

Abulitiouists,  attitude  toward,  in  New 
Hampshire,  302  ;  uou-votiug,  not  nu- 
merous iu  New  Hampshire,  308. 

Adams,  Beujamiu,  patriotic  act  of, 
223,  224 ;  iu  iiiaurrectiou  of  1T8G, 
238. 

Adams,  Brooks,  quoted,  52. 

Adams,  Charles  Francis,  quoted,  31  n. 

Adams,  John  Quiucy,  attitude  of,  to- 
ward New  Hampshire  Constitution 
(1787),  239. 

Albany,  Congress  at,  210. 

Allen,  Samuel,  claims  of,  in  New 
Hampshire,  77,  78  ;  Province  of  New 
Hampshire  sold  to,  114  ;  named  gov- 
ernor of  New  Hampshire,  ir>6;  denial 
of  claims  of,  157,  158  ;  attempts  to 
compromise  with,  IGO. 

"  Alliances,"  purpose  of  the  word  in 
declarations  of  independence,  219. 

Almshouses,  New  Hanjpshire,  328-330. 

Ambrose,  Alice,  sentence  against,  51. 

Andros,  Sir  Edmund,  83,  104  ;  arrival 
of,  113  ;  spoliations  of,  129  ;  Indians 
quieted  by,  140;  imprisonment  of, 
141  ;  Saint-Castin  plundered  by,  142. 

Anglican  Church.  See  England, 
Church  of. 

Appeal,  denial  of,  158. 

Apprentices,  custom  regarding,  300. 

Aristocracy,  tendency  toward,  28  ;  re- 
vival of  instinct  of,  273. 

Ashurst,  Henry,  81. 

Atherton,  Charles,  Whittier'B  lines  on, 
30Gn.,  308  n. 

Atherton,  Joshua,  231. 
Atkinson,  Theodore,  refusal  of,  to  give 
up  records,  1G2  n.  ;  part  of,  in  attack 
on  Louisbourg,  177 ;  delegate  to  Con- 
gress at  Albany,  210. 

Bacalaos,  Basque  name  for  codfish,  1. 

Bachelder,  Susanna,  grandmother  of 
Webster,  284. 

Bachiler,  Stepljen,  pastor  of  the  Com- 
pany of  the  Plough,  19,  20 ;  aims  of, 


19  n.  I  arbitrator  in  dispute  over  Ly- 
gouia,  21  ;    attempt  at  colonization 
by,   21,   35  ;    missionary    at    Ports- 
mouth, 23,  41  ;  descendants  of ,  35  n.; 
inveigled  into  marriage,  130  ;  career 
of,  284  n. 
Baker,  Alice,  147  n. 
Baker,  Mark,  99. 
Baker,  Captain  Thomas,  oflBces  held 

by,  14G,  147. 
Baltimore,  Lord,  5G. 
Bancroft,  Dr.  C.  P.,  325. 
Bancroft,  Dr.  J.  P.,  325. 
Baptists,  Puritan  injustice  toward,  62. 
Barefoot,  Walter,  first  record  of,  24  n.  ; 
Quakers  released  by,  48,  52;    Puri- 
tan domination  resisted  by,  52;  Pu- 
ritan prejudice  and  charges  against, 
G9-71,  12G;   legacy    of,   71  n.;    Ma- 
son claims  championed  by,  6G,  G8; 
charges   of   Littlebury   against,  GG, 
67 ;  forced  to  return  to  England,  73  ; 
moderation  of,  85  ;  illegal  acts  of,  as 
Randolph's  deputy,  92,  93;    efforts 
of,   against   contraband   goods,   9G; 
made  acting  governor,  105  ;  govern- 
ment of,  110;  maltreated  by  Wiggiu, 
110-112;  powers  of,  superseded,  113  ; 
arrest  of,  125,  12C. 
Barillon,  plea  of  Halifax  reported  by, 

107. 
Barlow,  Robert,  58. 
Barnard,  Mr.,  of  Audover,  ordination 

sermon  of,  18G. 
Barr6,  Colonel,  quoted,  198. 
Basque  fishermen,  1. 
Bay  Colony.    See  Massachusetts. 
"  Bay  horse,"  nicUname  for  Boston,  16. 
Belcher,  Jonatlian,  governor  of  Massa- 
chu.setts  and  New  Hampshire,  166  ; 
faction  formed  by,  in   New  Hamp- 
shire, 167  ;  removal  of,  171. 
Belknap,  Admiral,  311. 
Belknap,   Rev.   Jeremy,  belief  of,-  in 
Wheelwright  Deed,  164  n. ;  qu  ted, 
222 
Bell,  John,  elected  governor,  253. 
Bell,  Samuel,  governor  of  New  Hamp- 
shire, 251;  Toleration  Act  favortd 
by,  254. 


342 


INDEX 


Bellomont,  Lord,  governor  of  Massa- 
ohusettB  ami  New  Hampshire,  157. 

Bellows,  Colonel,  escape  of,  from  In- 
dians, 190.  , 

Bennington,  grant  of,  given  by  Went- 
worth,  202;  battle  of,  210;  trophies 
of,  220. 

Berwick,  original  name  of,  5. 

Binckes,  Bryan,  18. 

Blaithwait,  Mr.,  proposal  of,  concern- 
ing Mason,  70. 

Blanchard,  Thomas,  captured  by  In- 
dians, 183. 

Board  of  Trade  and  Plantations.  See 
Lords  of  Trade. 

BoUan,  Mr.,  I'.tO  n. 

Boston,  early  nickname  of,  IG. 

Boston  and  Maine  Railroad,  allegations 
against,  1521. 

Bosville,  Mr.,  34. 

Bound  House,  57,  62. 

Boundaries,  rights  of  property  not  lost 
by  change  of,  188. 

Bow,  proprietors  of,  178  ;  grant  of,  187. 

Brackett,  Anthony,  40. 

Brarlstreet,  Simon,  letter  of,  to  Ran- 
dolph, 79,  SO  ;  of  moderate  party  in 
Massachusetts,  85. 

Branding,  as  punishment  for  felony, 
132. 

Bribery,  commonness  of,  31,  36. 

Brockway,  Z.  R.,  debt  of  Elmira  to, 
330. 

Brooke,  Lord,  34. 

Brown,  John,  190  n. 

Brown,  Margery,  wife  of  John  Sulli- 
van, 181. 

Browne,  Rev.  Arthur,  195. 

Buchanan,  President,  policy  of,  in 
Kansas,  310. 

Buckingham,  Duka  of,  assassination 
of,  2. 

Bulkeley,  Rev.  Peter,  35  n.,  85. 

Bunce,  Sir  James,  50. 

Bunker  Hill,  New  Hampshire  men  at 
battle  of,  213,  214. 

Burdet,  George,  reception  of,  at  Do- 
ver, 9. 

Biirgoyne,  invasion  of  New  York  by, 
215  ;  defeat  of,  by  Stark,  210. 

Burnet,  William,  100 ;  prejudice  of, 
against  Puritans,  167. 

Cabot,  John,  1. 

Camock,  Captain  Thomas.  4,  IG. 

C^tnada,  French  explorers  in,  1 ;  incur- 
sions from,  141. 

Carlyle,  Thomas,  Webster  described 
by,  285. 

Carr,  Robert,  royal  commissioner,  53, 
59,  02,  64,  72. 

Cartier,  Jacques,  1. 


Cartwright,  George,  royal  commis- 
sioner, 53,  .59,  72. 

Casco,  Company  of  the  Plough  di- 
verted from,  19,  20  ;  Bachiler  called 
to,  41. 

Cass,  General,  298. 

Chadbourne,  Humphrey,  IG,  54. 

Chalmers,  George,  opinion  of,  on  Ma- 
son claims,  78,  79. 

Chamberlain,  Richard,  royal  secretary 
of  New  Hampshire,  15  n,,  90  ;  char- 
acter of,  92  ;  censured  by  Cranfield, 
94  ;  made  clerk  of  courts  by  Andros, 
113;  belief  of,  in  "stone-throwing 
devil,"  133,  134;  records  taken  from, 
162,  1G3  n. 

Champernown,  Francis,  estate  of,  8  ; 
associated  with  Thomas  Gorges,  23  ; 
money  advanced  to,  by  Barefoot,  24 
n.  ;  Puritan  domination  resisted  by, 
51  n.  ;  petition  of,  against  Mas.sachu- 
setts  usurpation,  53, 54;  Littlebury's 
charges  against,  67  ;  appointment  to 
counsel  by  James  II,  08;  treaty  of, 
with  Indians,  140. 

Chanceller,  James,  24  n. 

Charity,  increased  demand  for,  in  New 
Hampshire,  31G,  317  ;  development 
of  system  of,  324. 

Charles  I,  fondness  of,  for  arbitrary 
government,  11,  14. 

Charles  II,  New  England  patents 
granted  by,  2  ;  action  of,  regarding 
Quakers,  53 ;  royal  commission  ap- 
pointed by,  59,  GO  ;  commission  re- 
called by,  04  ;  laws  passed  by  New 
Hampshire  (1080)  disallowed  by,  93. 

Chase,  Salmon  P.,  Chief  Justice,  298. 

Child,  Sir  Josiah,  80. 

Church,  the,  an  element  of  Puritan 
political  life,  23. 

Church  members,  privileges  of,  22. 

Cilley,  Jonathan,  killed  in  duel,  307  n. 

Cilley,  Col.  Joseph,  at  Saratoga,  227  ; 
in  insurrection  of  1789,  238. 

Cilley,  Col.  Joseph,  elected  to  U.  S. 
Senate,  307. 

Cincinnati,  Society  of  the.  New  Hamp- 
shire, 230. 

Claggett,  Wyseman,  217. 

Clements,  Job,  member  of  first  royal 
Council  of  New  Hampshire,  90. 

Clergy,  Randolph's  opinion  of  the 
Massachusetts,  88  ;  Cranfield's  state- 
ment regarding,  90 ;  attitude  toward, 
in  Massachusetts,  152,  153. 

Clergy,  benefit  of,  132. 

Cobbett,  Thomas,  154. 

Codfish,  Basque  name  for,  1. 

Coffin,  Peter,  91. 

Coke,  Sir  F>dward,  opposition  of,  to 
grants  to  Gorges,  27. 


INDEX 


343 


Colby,  Anthony,  elected  governor  of 
New  Hiinipshire,  307. 

ColoorJ,  Kihvard,  Kif)  n. 

Colooid,  I'eter,  captured  by  Indians, 
183. 

Cole,  Eunice,  accused  of  witchcraft, 
121. 

Coleman,  Anna,  sentence  against,  51. 

College  graduates,  attitude  of,  toward 
Revolution,  'J31,  252. 

Coliner,  Abraham,  07  n. 

Colonization,  parliamentary  doctrine 
of,  28. 

Committee  of  Safety,  New  Hampshire, 
211,  220. 

Committee  of  Supply,  New  Hampshire, 
220. 

Company  of  the  Plough,  grant  of  land 
to,  18 ;  disa-sters  to,  li),  20  ;  disputes 
concerning  patent  of,  20,  21.  See 
also  Plough,  ship. 

Concord,  Mass.,  Emerson  on  town  re- 
cords of,  120. 

Concord,  N.  H.,  contest  over  grants  in, 
173, 178, 181, 1S4-18G;  disfranchised, 
188  ;  anti-slavery  newspapers  of, 
306  n.  ;  insane  hospital  at,  324-327  ; 
state  prison  at,  330. 

Congregational  clergy,  claims  of,  253, 
254. 

Continental  Congress,  New  Hamp- 
shire delegates  to.  210 ;  opposition 
of  Wentworth  to,  211. 

Cooke,  Elisha,  81. 

Copley,  Colonel,  estimate  of  Randolph 
by,  "83. 

Corbet,  Abraham,  imprisonment  of, 
04. 

Corbin,  Austin,  estate  of,  334. 

Corouado,  Carolina,  311. 

Corporations,  laws  regarding,  in  New 
Hampshire,  321 ;  dangers  of,  331- 
333. 

Cotton,  John,  4. 

Cotton,  Seaborn,  121. 

Council  for  New  England,  3,  C8,  112  ; 
move  to  dissolve,  30,  37. 

Counterfeiters,  130. 

Counties,  New  Hampshire,  named  for 
Wentworth  "s  English  friends,  206. 

Coventry,  William,  59. 

Cradock,  Matthew,  vessels  of,  held,  36. 

Cranfield,  Edward,  failure  of,  to  main- 
tain Mason's  claims,  70 ;  effect  of 
tyranny  of,  79,  80,  98;  powers  of,  92, 
97,  98  ;  arrival  of,  at  Salem,  93,  94  ; 
ancestry  of,  94  n.  ;  Mason  and  Cham- 
berlain censured  by,  94,  95  ;  Mason 
supported  by,  90  ;  alarm  of,  at  Gove's 
demonstration,  100  ;  fast  day  named 
by,  103,  104;  fall  of,  105,  106;  suits 
brought  by,  106  ;  petition  against. 


107  ;  rebuked  by  Halifax,  108  ;  goes 
to  Barbados,  109  ;  king's  instruc- 
tions to,  128,  129. 

Crime,  uncommon  in  early  history  of 
New  Hampshire,  127. 

Crisp,  Sir  Nicholas,  50. 

Crispe,  John,  18. 

Currency,  regulation  of,  129. 

Gushing,  General,  Douglas  opposed 
by,  310. 

Cutt,  John,  Champernown's  petition 
against,  53 ;  moderation  of,  85 ; 
named  president  of  council  for  New 
Hampshire,  89  ;  fast  proclaimed  bv, 
134. 

Cutt,  Richard,  Champemovni's  peti- 
tion against,  54  ;  relations  of,  with 
royal  commissioners,  71,  72. 

Cutt,  Robert,  54. 

Cutt,  Ursula,  killed  by  Indians,  145, 
140. 

Cutts,  Samuel,  218. 

Dalton,  Samuel,  member  of  first  royal 
Council  of  New  Hampshire,  90. 

Danforth,  Thomas,  04. 

Dauiel,  R.,  quoted,  134. 

Dartmouth  College,  origin  of  name, 
207  ;  Governor  Wentworth's  aid  to, 
207 ;  attractions  of,  242 ;  effort  to 
reorganize,  251,  252  ;  growth  of, 
323. 

Davis,  Jefferson,  309,  310  n. 

Deane,  Charles,  quoted,  75. 

Declaration  of  Independence,  New 
Hampshire's,  218. 

Deering,  origin  of  name,  207. 

Democratic  (Republican)  party,  in 
New  Hampshire,  245,  240,  250-254  ; 
attitude  of,  toward  slavery,  302, 
303 ;  Hale  supported  by,  305,  306 ; 
Douglas  supported  by,  310. 

Derry,  founders  of,  149,  177. 

Dinsmoor,  Governor,  insane  hospital 
recommended  by,  326. 

Dissenters,  attitude  of  Charles  to- 
ward, 85. 

Divorce,  customs  regarding,  131,  132. 

Dolphin  Inn,  Great  Island,  124. 

Dorchester,  Lord,  31  n. 

Douglas,  Stephen  A.,  supported  in 
N.  H.,  310. 

Dover,  settlement  of,  4  ;  reception  of 
Burdet  at,  9  ;  government  of  Massa- 
chusetts accepted  by,  22 ;  repre- 
sented in  Boston  General  Court,  42; 
an  independent  republic,  116  ; 
warned  of  intended  Indian  attack, 
140. 

Dow,  Henry,  154. 

Downing,  Emanuel,  services  of,  31  n. 

Dudley,  John,  218. 


344 


INDEX 


Dudley,  Judge  John,  281. 

Dudley,  Joseph,  president  of  Council 
for  all  New  Englaud,  112  ;  message 
brought  from  queen  by,  ItiO. 

Dudley,  Rev.  Samuel,  1U5  n. 

Dummer,  Ricliard,  arrival  of,  in  Bos- 
ton, 20. 

Dunbar,  Rev.  Asa,  231,  275. 

Duresme,  Bishop  of,  13. 

Durham,  agricultural  college  at,  323. 

Dustan,  Hannah,  escape  of,  186. 

Dye,  John,  18 ;  letter  of,  concerning 
bounds  of  Lygouia,  21. 

Dyer,  Mary,  hanging  of,  50. 

Eastwick,  Pheasant,  made  coroner  by 
Andros,  113. 

Edgerly,  Thomas,  154. 

Education,  in  New  Hampshire,  242, 
322,  323 ;  taxation  for,  25G. 

Eliot,  John,  opinion  of,  regarding  Dr. 
Langdou,  2G4  n. 

Elliott,  Robert,  00,  154. 

Elmira,  reformatory  at,  330. 

Elwyn,  John  Langdon,  John  Langdon 
described  by,  206,  207. 

Emerson,  Ralph  Waldo,  quoted,  119, 
120,  259. 

Emery,  John,  fined,  48 ;  helps  free 
Quakers,  52. 

Emigration,  suspension  of  restrictions 
on,  from  England,  13  ;  from  New 
Hampshire,  240,  241. 

Endicott,  John,  prejudices  against, 
in  England,  31,  35 ;  defended  by 
Wiggin,  32  ;  Quakers  sentenced  by, 
50. 

England,  Church  of,  supporters  of,  4, 
8 ;  est.ablished  iu  New  Hampshire, 
5,  6,  13  ;  recognized  in  Portsmouth, 
22 ;  establishment  of,  enjoined,  37  ; 
difficulties  of  establishing,  38  ;  hos- 
tility to,  in  New  Hampshire,  95. 

Exeter,  on  ill  terms  with  Massachu- 
setts, 22 ;  source  of  discontent  in, 
23 ;  Bachiler  called  to,  41  ;  never 
represented  in  Boston  General  Court, 
42;  an  independent  republic,  110; 
Wheelwright  at,  117  ;  conventions 
at,  212,  216,  220.  See  also  Phillips 
Exeter  Academy. 

Exton,  Dr.  John,  56. 

Eyre,  Eliezer,  4. 

Eyre,  Thomas,  4  ;  agreement  of,  wiUi 
Littlebury,  67. 

Parmer,  John,  165  n. 

Farming,  decline  of,  241,  317  ;  invest- 
ments in,  256. 

Federalist  party,  of  New  Hampshire, 
245,  246,  249-254 ;  some  prominent 
members  of,  274,  275. 


Femald,  Dr.  Ronald,  40,  43. 

Fogg,  G.  G.,  3U7  u. ;  secretary  of  the 
National  Republican  Committee 
(1860),  311. 

FoUet,  Nicholas,  151. 

Folsom,  Nathaniel,  delegate  to  Conti- 
nental Congre.ss,  210. 

Ford,  Sir  Richard,  56. 

Forests,  exploitation  of,  335. 

Forgeries,  as  basis  of  laud  claims,  163- 
105. 

Fort  St.  George,  abandoned  by  colo- 
nists, 7. 

Foster,  Stephen,  302. 

Fowle,  Dauiel,  200  n. 

Fox,  George,  followers  of,  denounced, 
49. 

Francestown,  named  for  Mrs.  Weut- 
worth,  207. 

FrankUu,  Orphan  Asylum  at,  329. 

Freemen,  privileges  of,  restricted  to 
church  members,  22,  63. 

French,  iu  Canada  and  Maine,  1. 

French  Revolution,  effect  of,  273. 

Fryer,  Nathaniel,  Champernowu's  pe- 
tition against,  54 ;  treaty  of,  with 
Indians,  110  ;  member  of  constitu- 
tional convention  (1690),  154. 

Puller,  Rachel,  accused  of  witchcraft, 
121. 

Gaffield,  Eunice,  captured  by  Indian^, 
197. 

Gage,  General,  213. 

Gardiner,  Sir  Christopher,  accusations 
of,  against  Massachusetts,  31 ;  letters 
to,  opened.  3;^,  34. 

Gardner,  Griffith,  agreement  of,  with 
Littlebury,  67. 

Gardner,  Henry,  4. 

Geary,  John  W.,  governor  of  Kansas, 
310. 

General  governor,  of  New  England. 
See  Governor-general. 

George  II,  affection  for,  in  New  Hamp- 
shire, 20(1,  201. 

George  III,  reputation  of,  in  New 
Hampshire,  201. 

Gerrish,  Capt.  John,  154. 

Ghent,  treaty  of,  250. 

Gibbons,  Ambrose,  16,  40. 

Gibson,  Rev.  Richard,  rector  at  Ports- 
mouth, 22  ;  forced  to  return  to  Eng- 
land, 23,  40. 

Gilbert,  Sir  Humphrey,  1 ;  voyages 
of,  0. 

Gilbert,  Raleigh,  as  portrayed  by 
Gorges.  29. 

Oilman,  Major,  sufferings  of,  during 
Revolution,  227-2.30. 

Oilman,  John,  member  of  first  royal 
Council  of  New  Hampshire,  90. 


INDEX 


345 


Oilman,  John  Taylor,  govemoraliip 
long  held  by,  'J4G,  'J47. 

Giliuiin,  Nicholas,  colonial  treasurer, 
221  ;  in  insurrection  of  ITStj,  238. 

Goddard,  Ur.,  comment  of,  on  Web- 
ster, 2S(). 

Godfrey,  Edward,  IG,  30 ;  associated 
with  Thomas  Gorges,  23 ;  jietition 
of,  regarding  Mason  estates,  &5 ; 
losses  of,  57. 

Golden  Kalcon,  vessel,  24  n. 

Golden  Hinde,  foundering  of,  C. 

Gordon,  Rev.  William,  2G5  n. 

Gorgeaua,  abode  of  Thomas  Gorges, 
23. 

Gorges,  Sir  Ferdinaudo,  patents 
granted  to,  2-4  ;  colonization  doc- 
trines of,  5,  8,  9,  28  ;  confusion  be- 
tween grants  given  by  Mason  and, 
10,  24 ;  possible  visit  of,  to  Maine, 
23 ;  grants  to,  opposed  by  Coke, 
27  ;  defends  his  sclieme,  28  ;  Gilbert 
portrayed  by,  29 ;  hostility  of,  to 
Bostouians,  31,  35;  letters  from, 
opened,  32,  33;  named  governor- 
general,  37,  39;  means  of,  exhau.sted, 
38 ;  probably  never  saw  New  Eng- 
land, 39. 

Gorges,  Thomas,  sent  to  govern  Maine 
Province,  23. 

Gove,  Edward,  4.'")  n.,  9]  ;  revolt  headed 
by,  98,  99,  101-104;  sentence  of,  100  ; 
pardoned,  100  n.,  104 ;  sent  to  Tower, 
101  ;  letter  of,  to  Randolph,  104  ; 
member  of  coustitutional  convention 
(1(;90),  1.04. 

Governor-general,  of  New  England, 
powers  of,  12,  13  ;  plans  to  appoint, 
23,  36. } 

Grant,  General  U.  S.,  vote  for,  in  New 
Hampshire,  312. 

Grants.    See  Patents. 

Graves,  Mr.,  master  of  the  Plough, 
20. 

Great  Bay,  Greenland,  8. 

Great  Island,  now  New  Castle,  IG  ; 
first  General  Assembly  of  New 
Hampshire  at,  91. 

Greeley,  Horace,  298 ;  candidate  for 
President,  312. 

Green,  Henry,  ICA. 

Greenill,  Robert,  24  n. 

Greenland,  included  in  Strawberry 
Bank  settlement,  5  ;  origin  of  name 
of,  8. 

Greenland,  Dr.  Henry,  52  ;  quarrel  of, 
with  Cutt  brothers,  71,  72;  banish- 
ment of,  73. 

Greenland,  Mary,  accused  of  being  a 
witch,  120. 

Griffith,  George,  4. 

Guy,  Edwin,  4. 


Hale,  John  Parker,  anti-slavery  opin- 
ion rejiresented  by,  259  ;  career  of, 
297,298,304;  members  of  meeting 
called  to  support,  30G  u.  ;  minister 
to  Spain,  311. 

Halifax,  Lord.  See  Savile,  George, 
Marquis  of  Halifax. 

Hall,  Ralph,  91. 

Hani,  Mrs.  John,  145. 

Hamilton,  Alexander,  Sullivan's  re- 
commendation of,  235  ;  contention 
between  Jetterson  and,  240  ;  com- 
pliment of,  to  Langdon,  207. 

Hampton,  original  settlement  at,  21  ; 
govermuent  of  Massachusetts  ac- 
cepted by,  22;  granted  to  Puritan 
colony,  35 ;  Wheelwright  removes  to, 
42;  represented  in  Boston  General 
Court,  42  ;  an  independent  republic, 
IIG  ;  Bachiler  and  Winthropat,  117  ; 
witchcraft  in,  120,  121 ;  refusal  of, 
to  choose  councilors,  155. 

Hanson,  Joljn,  wife  and  children  of, 
captured  by  Indians,  182  n. 

Harbert,  S.,  24  n. 

Hartford  Convention,  not  sanctioned 
by  New  Hampshire,  250. 

Haslerigg,  Sir  A.,  34. 

Hawthorne,  Nathaniel,  quoted,  290  n.  ; 
friendship  of,  with  Franklin  Pierce, 
290,  297. 

Hawthorne,  William,  139. 

Hayes,  J.  L.,  Hale  supjiorted  by,  30. 

Heard,  Elizabeth,  escape  of,  from 
Indians,  144,  145. 

Heard,  Tristram,  182  n. 

Hebrides,  John  Mason's  expedition 
to,  3. 

Herbert,  George,  on  English  religion, 
19. 

Hill,  Isaac,  174  ;  influence  of,  254, 255  ; 
offices  held  by,  25G. 

Hilton,  Edward,  settlement  of,  in 
Dover,  4  ;  patent  of,  sustained,  25  ; 
disposition  of  part  of  patent  of,  34  ; 
land  taken  by,  on  Lampereel  River, 
GG. 

Hilton,  Martha,  wife  of  Benning  Went- 
worth,  195;  heroine  of  Longfellow's 
"  Lady  Wentworth,"  195  n. 

Hilton,  William,  settlement  of,  in 
Dover,  4  ;  patents  of,  sustained,  25  ; 
delegate  to  convention  (1G90),  154. 

Hincks,  John,  113. 

Hinsdale,  Indian  attack  on,  19G,  197. 

Hoar,  John,  petition  of,  against  Puri- 
tan courts,  04. 

Hobbs,  Morris,  154. 

Holyoke,  Edward,  34. 

Howe,  Mrs.  Jemima,  captured  by  In- 
dians, 19G,  197. 

Hoyt,  Professor,  305. 


346 


INDEX 


Hubbard,  Gov.  Henry,  associated  with 
Isaac  Hill,  255 ;  views  of,  regard- 
ing corporations,  331 ,  332. 

Hubbard,  Rev.  William,  quoted,  139, 
149. 

Humphreys,  David,  197. 

Hussey,  Cliristopher,  petition  advised 
by,  45  ;  judgment  against,  47  ;  ap- 
pointed royal  councilor,  48  n.,  90. 

Hutchinson,  Edward,  170,  171. 

Illiteracy,  percentage  of,  in  New 
Hampshire,  318;  check  on,  321. 

Immigration,  results  of,  in  New  Hamp- 
shire, 316-321. 

ImmoraUty,  not  uncommon,  130. 

Impeachment,  judicial,  sole  case  of, 
in  New  Hampshire,  271,  272. 

Indian  campaign  (1723-24),  grant  to 
survivors  of,  182. 

Indians,  outrages  against,  in  Maine, 
137 ;  treachery  of  Waldron  toward, 
139  ;  ammunition  supplied  to,  141  ; 
incited  against  Audros,  142 ;  Wal- 
dron murdered  by,  142,  143 ;  prac- 
tical extermination  of,  in  New 
Hampshire,  151 ;  raids  of,  in  New 
Hampshire,  182,  183,  19G. 

Industries,  of  New  Hampshire,  241, 
318  n.,  334,  335. 

Iimkeeping,  124. 

Insane,  care  of,  in  New  Hampshire, 
324-327. 

Isles  of  Shoals,  7,  40. 

Jacob,  Sir  John,  5G. 

Jatfrey,  George,  9G,  97. 

Jefferson,  Thomas,  contention  between 
Hamilton  and,  24G. 

Jeffreys,  George,  arguments  of  Hali- 
fax against,  107  ;  Kirke  censured  by, 
110. 

Jewett,  Sarah  Orne,  181  n. 

Jobe,  M.,  67  n. 

Jocelyn,  Henry,  4,  16;  associated 
with  Thomas  Gorges,  23 ;  Puritan 
domination  resisted  by,  51  n. 

Johnson,  Andrew,  attitude  of  New 
Hampshire  toward,  312. 

Jones,  Daniel,  232. 

Jones,  Paul,  215. 

Jordan,  Rev.  Robert,  21. 

Josselyn,  John,  Maverick  described  by, 
59. 

Jupe,  Anthony,  18. 

Jupe,  Thomas,  18. 

Ju.stice,  few  instances  of  perverted,  in 
New  Hampshire,  133. 

Kansas,  Free-State  pioneers  in,  309  ; 
settlers  from  New  Hampshire  in, 
309. 


Kilbuni,  John,  Indians  repulsed  by, 

196. 

King  Philip's  war,  effects  of,  80,  140. 

King  William's  war,  148. 

King's  Lyun,  birthplace  of  John  Ma- 
son, 2  ;  land  given  to,  by  Mason,  10. 

Kipling,  Bryan,  18. 

Kirke,  Col.  Piercey,  censured  by  Jef- 
fries, 110. 

Kittery,  Champemown  at,  24. 

La  Boetie,  Etienne  de,  verses  of,  1. 

Lacouia,  grant  of,  to  John  Mason,  3 ; 
school  for  feeble-minded  at,  329. 

Lampereel  River,  06. 

Langdon,  John,  199  ;  revolutionary 
sympathies  of,  209;  fort  seized  by, 
211  ;  Ranger  built  by,  215  ;  offer  of, 
for  repelling  Burgoyue,  226 ;  Gilman 
defeated  by,  246 ;  death  of,  262 ; 
career  of,  265-270  ;  anecdote  of,  337. 

Langdon,  Rev.  Samuel,  sermon  of,  on 
King  George's  birthday,  201  ;  presi- 
dent of  Harvard  College,  213  ;  death 
of,  262  ;  career  of,  264,  265. 

Langdon,  Judge  Woodbury,  career  of, 
270-273. 

Langley,  Thomas,  24  n. 

Lark,  ship,  96. 

Laud,  Archbishop,  secret  correspond- 
ence of  Burdet  with,  9;  church 
policy  of,  15 ;  hatred  of,  for  Puri- 
tans, 36  ;  establishment  of  Anglican 
church  ordered  by,  37. 

Leavitt,  Reuben,  303  n. 

Leavitt,  Samuel,  \r>i. 

Lee,  Abraham,  killed  by  Indians,  144. 

Lee,  Charles,  225. 

Leverett,  John,  57,  64 ;  Randolph  re- 
proved by,  86,  87. 

Levitt,  Thomas,  165  n. 

Lewis,  Phihp,  91. 

Lexington,  New  Hampshire  in  battle 
of,  213. 

Liberty  party,  307  ii. 

Libraries,  in  New  Hampshire,  323. 

Lincoln,  Abr.T,ham,  New  Hampshire 
first  New  England  State  to  declare 
for,  311. 

Liquor,  free  use  of,  124 ;  importation 
of,  125 ;  laws  regarding  sale  of,  in 
New  Hampshire,  322. 

Little  Harbor,  original  name  of,  4. 

Littlebury,  Capt.  John,  claims  of, 
against  Barefoot  and  Shapleigh,  66, 
67. 

Livius,  Peter,  charges  of,  against  Sir 
Jolni  Wentworth,  205. 

Livermore,  Judge  Arthur,  anecdotes 
of,  291  n. 

Londonderry,  fovmders  of,  149. 

Longfellow,  Henry  Wadsworth,  195  n. 


INDEX 


347 


Lords  of  Trade  and  Plantations,  Bob- 
toniaus  directed  to  i)rfn('iit  case  to, 
G4;  letter  of,  re);ardiiiK  rijflit  of  ap- 
peal, \r>S  ;  New  Hampshire  favored 
by,  1C8. 

Louis  XIV,  coniniput  of,  on  Lord 
Halifax,  107,  108;  purposes  of,  in 
America,  137. 

Louisbourg,  capture  of,  177. 

LovewoU,  John,  campaign  of,  against 
Indians,  183;  disasters  to,  184. 

Lowland   dialect,  in  New  Hampshire, 

Lutwyche,  ^dward,  207. 

Lyde,  Edward,  133. 

Lygouia,  granted  to   the  Company  of 

the  Plough,  19;  disputes  concerning 

bounds  of,  20,  21. 

Macaulay,  T.  B.,  quoted,  105. 

Macy,  Thomas,  law  aimed  at,  44,  45 ; 
becomes  Quaker,  48. 

Madawaskarbet,  Diogenes,  Abenaki 
Indian,  137. 

Madison,  James,  John  Langdon's  opin- 
ion of,  209  ;  attitude  of  New  Hamp- 
shire Federalists  toward,  270. 

Magistrates,  attitude  toward,  in  Mas- 
sachusetts, 1,''>2. 

Maine,  French  explorers  in,  1  ;  grants 
in,  to  Mason  and  Gorges,  3 ;  to 
Camock  and  Jocelyn,  4,  5 ;  Thomas 
Gorges  acting  governor  of,  23  ;  dom- 
ination of  Massachusetts  in,  25; 
early  aristocratic  tendency  in,  28  ; 
Gorges  grants  in,  bought  by  Bay 
Colony,  41,  88;  claim  of  Mason 
heirs  in,  55,  5G  ;  purpose  to  unite 
New  Hampshire  with,  88  ;  Catholic 
influence  in,  137. 

Makepeace,  Mr.,  34. 

Manchester,  almsliouse  at,  328  ;  In- 
dustrial School  at,  329. 

Mansfield,  Lord.    See  Murray,  David. 

Manslaughter,  two  cases  of,  134. 

M.Tnufactures,  development  of,  in  New 
Hampshire,  241,  25G,  317,  318. 

Mariana,  grant  of,  to  John  Mason,  3. 

Marriage  customs,  1.31. 

Marston,  Gilman,  regiment  raised  by, 
310. 

Marston,  Thomas,  91. 

Martyn,  Richard,  treasurer  of  first 
royal  Council  of  New  Hampshire, 
90,94. 

Mason,  Mrs.  Anne,  claims  of,  opposed, 
25,  43. 

Mason,  .Teremiah,  advice  of,  in  Dart- 
mouth College  ca.se,  251  ;  feeling 
against,  2.53 ;  attitude  of,  toward 
Missouri  Compromise,  301,  302. 

Mason,    John,    Hues  of,    quoted,  2  ; 


founder  of  New  Hampshire,  2 ;  grants 
to,  2,  3,  4  ;  expedition  of,  to  the  Heb- 
rides, 3;  colonization  schemes  of ,  5, 
8,  9  ;  named  Vice-Admiral  of  New 
England,  5;  possible  visit  of,  to  N(fW 
Hampshire,  8;  confusion  between 
grants  of  Gorgtsand,  10,  24;  nothing 
received  by  heirs  of,  10  ;  never  exer- 
cised powers  as  Vice-Admiral,  10  ; 
proposed  extent  of  those  powers,  11, 
13,  15  ;  cost  of  plantations  of,  10, 
17  ;  hostility  of,  to  Bostonians,  31, 
35  ;  finaucial  responsibilities  of,  38; 
death  of,  39;  efforts  of  heirs  of,  55, 

64  ;  arbitration  oflered  by,  08  ;  jus- 
tice of  claims  of,  09, 73,  74 ;  decision 
regarding  claims  of,  88 ;  further 
quarrels  concerning  claims  of,  92. 

Mason,  John  Tuftoii,  103;  encouraged 
by  Massachusetts,  to  assert  claims, 
170. 

Mason,  Joseph,  43, 58  ;  returns  to  Eng- 
land, 05 ;  proposition  of,  for  settle- 
ment of  claims,  101. 

Mason,  Robert,  contested  claim  of,  32, 
43 ;  petitions  of,  regarding  claim,  55, 

65  ;  losses  of,  57  ;  gives  power  of 
attorney  to  Col.  Nichols,  58;  death 
of,  08  ;  appointment  to  Council  by 
James  II,  OS ;  characteristics  of,  68 ; 
Blaithwait's  proposal  concerning, 
76;  inefiectiveness  of,  78;  prosper- 
ity of  New  Hampshire  described  by, 
79 ;  charges  of  William  Vaughan 
against,  80,  81  ;  appointed  to  royal 
Council  (1080  and  1081),  92,  93  ;  cen- 
sured by  Cranfield,  94  ;  inability  of, 
to  collect  rents,  106  ;  maltreated  by 
Wiggin,  110-112;  previous  threats 
of,  112  ;  member  of  Council  for  all 
New  England,  112  ;  address  carried 
to  James  II  by,  113;  laud  sold  and 
leased  by,  114. 

Mason,  Dr.  Robert,  56. 

Massachusetts,  Puritans  of,  9,  10  ;  en- 
croachments of,  in  New  Hampshire, 
25,  26,  30,  32,  39,  42,  44-53,  57,  60- 
62,  89,  100  ;  purpose  of  Stuarts  re- 
garding charter  of,  26;  less  demo- 
cratic than  Plymouth,  29  ;  hostility 
of  Mason  and  Gorges  to,  31  n.;  ex- 
istence of,  threatened,  35,  36;  claims 
of,  in  New  Hampshire,  set  aside,  41, 
53,  08,  89;  made  a  royal  Province, 
42  ;  treatment  of  Qu.'ikers  in,  48-53  ; 
letter  of,  to  King  Charles,  00 ;  fur- 
ther charges  against,  62,  63  ;  char- 
ter of,  canceled,  68;  hostility  of, 
to  Barefoot,  69,  70  ;  unfriendly  to 
liberty  of  i)eople,  75,  86;  effort  of, 
to  include  New  Hampsliire  in  new 
charter,  81 ;   inconsistencies  of,  85 ; 


348 


INDEX 


purchases  of,  in  Maine,  88  ;  decision 
regarding  boundaries  of,  88,  ir>9 ; 
claim  of,  to  Mabon's  laud-graut,  116  ; 
grants  made  by,  in  New  HampBliire, 
167,  ITS,  179,  ISl-l'Jl;  dislike  for,  in 
England,  109;  occasional  later  ani- 
mosities between  New  Hampshire 
and,  174. 

Massachusetts  Company,  charter  of, 
threatened,  35,  30. 

Mather,  Cotton,  67  n. 

Mather,  Increase,  81. 

Maverick,  Samuel,  royal  commissioner, 
53,  59,  02,  72 ;  imprisoned,  59  ;  re- 
moves to  Virginia,  00. 

Mesandowit,  sachem,  143. 

Metcalf,  Ralph,  governor  of  New 
Hampshire,  309. 

Ministers.     See  Clergy. 

Missouri  Compromise,  attitude  of  New 
Hampsliire  toward,  301. 

Mohawk  Indians,  incursion  of,  140. 

Monmouth,  New  Hampshire  men  at 
battle  of,  227. 

Moumoutli,  Duke  of,  proposed  princi- 
paUty  for,  88. 

Monroe,  James,  New  Hampshire's  vote 
for,  250,  251. 

IMontgomery,  James,  ancestors  of,  309. 

Moodey,  Rev.  Joshua,  minister  at 
Portsmouth,  23,  41  ;  Champernowii's 
petition  against,  ,54  ;  training  of,  55; 
commercial  ventures  of,  97. 

Moody,  Rev.  Samuel,  John  Sullivan 
aided  by,  180. 

Morgan,  Silvanus,  quotations  from  his 
"  Sphere  of  Gentry,"  19  n. 

Morris,  Robert,  235,  207. 

Morton,  Thomas,  of  Merrymount,  ac- 
cusations of,  31 ;  hostility  of,  to  Bos- 
tonians,  35. 

Moulton,  Gen.,  237. 

Murray,  David,  Lord  Mansfield,  re- 
tained in  Concord  contest,  189;  later 
opinion  of,  191. 

Music,  cultivation  of,  133. 

Myles,  Dr.  John,  56. 

Narragansett  Indians,  hostility  of,  140. 

Navigation  Acts,  92,  97  n. 

Neale,  Walter,  4  ;  partnership  of,  with 
Mason  and  Gorges,  5 ;  in  cliarge  of 
Portsmouth  colony,  16;  forged  sig- 
nature of,  32,  44 ;  at  variance  with 
Wintlirop,  33,  34. 

Nevin,  James,  195. 

New  Castle,  included  in  Strawberry 
Bank  settlement,  5;  parly  fort 
planned  at,  10  ;  fort  seized,  211  ; 
Gov.  Wentworth  takes  refuge  in, 
213. 

New  England,  early  European  visita- 


tions to,  1;  christened  by  Capt. 
John  Smith,  6.  See  also  Council  for 
New  England. 

New  England  Commissioners,  Mason 
claims  examined  by,  65. 

New  Hampsliire,  founder  of,  2  ;  Capt. 
Jolin  Smith's  impressions  of,  7 ;  leg- 
acy of  Mason  to,  10;  proposed  powers 
of  Mason  in,  11,  13,  15;  draft  of 
charter  of,  11-15;  domination  of 
Massachusetts  in,  25,  30,  39,  42,  44- 
53,  89;  separate  provincial  organi- 
zation in,  26,  89;  early  aristocratic 
tendency  in,  28  ;  anxiety  of  Puritans 
to  acquire  land  in,  34;  claims  of 
Massachusetts  in,  set  aside,  41,  53  ; 
treatment  of  Quakers  in,  48-53 ; 
claim  of  Mason  heirs  to,  55,  56 ; 
these  claims  resisted  by,  74,  75;  kept 
from  uniting  with  Massachusetts,  78; 
prosperity  of,  79  ;  decline  of,  80  ;  ef- 
fort to  include,  in  new  Massachu- 
setts charter,  81  ;  purpose  to  unite 
Maine  with,  88;  letter  from  Gen- 
eral Court  of,  to  king,  89 ;  first 
royal  Council  of,  90  ;  Bill  of  Rights 
passed  by  (1680),  91  ;  this  bill  dis- 
allowed by  king,  93  ;  arrival  of 
Cranfield  in,  94 ;  tyranny  of  Cran- 
field  in,  98;  comes  under  provi- 
sional revolutionary  government  of 
Massachusetts,  113,  114;  anomalous 
situation  of,  115,  110  ;  township  sys- 
tem in,  117  ;  resistance  of,  to  arbi- 
trary power,  118 ;  loyalty  of,  to 
English  monarcliy,  118,  119;  witch- 
craft in,  120,  121 ;  religious  toleration 
in,  121,  122 ;  character  of  early  set- 
tlers in,  135,  136  ;  losses  in,  tlirough 
Indian  wars,  147,  148,  1.50 ;  obsta- 
cles overcome  by  colonists  in,  148, 
149  ;  first  constitution  in,  153-155 ; 
petition  of,  to  be  included  in  Mas- 
sacliusetts,  156  ;  attempt  in,  to  com- 
promise with  Allen,  160,  101  ;  muti- 
lation of  records  of,  162  ;  forgeries 
of  records  in,  163-165  ;  salary  voted 
to  governor  of,  167 ;  decision  of 
boundary  question  demanded,  168 ; 
boundary  line  of,  fixed,  109,  170  ; 
occasional  renewals  of  animosity 
between  Massachusetts  and,  174 ; 
early  area  of,  175;  mountains  of, 
176;  Scotch-Irish  settlers  in,  177; 
contest  over  Massac liii setts  grant  of 
Concord,  178,  181-191  ;  increase  of 
population  in,  192, 193,240;  .shipping 
of,  192  ;  trade  of,  193  ;  militia  of, 
193  ;  renewed  Indian  atrocities  in, 
196,  197;  troops  raised  by,  against 
French,  198, 199;  debt  of,  199;  affec- 
tion of,  for  George  II,  200 ;  Sir  John 


INDEX 


349 


Wentworth,  governor  of,  202,  203 ; 
countries  of,  'JOG,  200  n.  ;  Pruvini'ial 
Congresses  in,  210-212,  210,  220  ; 
men  from,  in  Revolution,  213-215, 
224,  225,  227,  231;  escapes  inva- 
sion durinn  Revolution,  215  ;  Ver- 
mont claimed  by,  215,  232-234;  co- 
lonial relations  favored  in,  till  1776, 
210,  217;  constitution  of  1783,  217, 
237,  243,  244;  first  House  of  Repre- 
sentatives in,  21  s  ;  declaration  of  in- 
dependence in,  218,  210;  town  gov- 
ernment in,  220  ;  Revolution  upheld 
b3'  plain  people  of,  232  ;  financial 
condition  of,  23()-238,  256  ;  consti- 
tution of  1787,  238,  231);  emigration 
from,  240,  241  ;  industries  of,  241, 
318  n.,  334,  335;  education  in,  242, 
256,  322,  323;  legislature  of,  244; 
party  lines  in,  245,  246, 250-253,  312  ; 
prosperity  of  (1823),  248,  249  ;  effect 
of  Civil  War  on,  257,  314  ;  slavery  in, 
300,  301  ;  attitude  in,  toward  aboli- 
tionists, 302,  303  ;  mass  meeting  in, 
favoring  Hale,  305  ;  organization  of 
anti-slavery  force  in,  308  ;  sympathy 
for  Kansas  in,  309;  men  raised  by, 
in  CivilWar,  310,  311  ;  summer  travel 
in,  315  ;  valuation  of  property  in,  315, 
316,  320  n.  ;  increased  demand  for 
charity  in,  31G,  317,  326  ;  results  of 
immigration  in,  316-321 ;  ratio  of  re- 
presentation in  legislature  of,  320, 
321;  corporations  in,  321,331-333; 
prohibition  in,  322  ;  libraries  in,  323  ; 
care  of  insane  in,  324-327  ;  pauper- 
ism in,  327-330  ;  prisons  of,  330  ; 
judiciary  of,  330,  331  ;  forests  of, 
335 ;  present  type  of  public  men  in, 
337. 

"  New  Hampshire  Gazette,"  200  n. 

New  Hampshire  Province  Laws,  116. 

New  Orleans,  victory  of  Jackson  at, 
250. 

New  York,  jurisdiction  of,  over  New 
Hampshire,  170  ;  claim  of,  to  Ver- 
mont, confirmed,  202. 

Newfoundland,  reached  by  Gilbert,  6  ; 
colony  at,  8. 

Newichwannock  (now  South  Berwick), 
colony  at,  5 ;  Mason's  property  at, 
10,  16. 

Nicholas,  Edward,  letter  of  Mason  to, 
11. 

Nichols,  Col.  Richard,  given  power 
of  attorney  by  Robert  Mason,  58  ; 
makes  Shapleigh  Mason's  attorney, 
58,  65  ;  royal  commissioner,  59. 

Norris,  ftloses,  associated  with  Isaac 
HiU,  255 ;  in  slavery  agitation,  303. 

Norsemen,  1. 

North,  Judge,  88. 


Nuffield,  grant  of,  179. 
Nutter,  Anthony,  91. 

Oakes,  Thomas,  81. 

Occupations.     See  Industries. 

Odiorne's  Point,  8.  See  also  Little 
Harbor. 

"  Ordinaries,"  regulation  of,  124. 

O'Sullivan,  Owen.    See  Sullivan,  John. 

Otis,  Margaret,  captured  by  Indians, 
146. 

Otis,  Margaret  (rechristened  Chris- 
tine), captured  by  Indians,  14G  ; 
later  adventures  of,  146,  147. 

Otis,  Richard,  killed  by  Indians,  144. 

Palmer,  Christopher,  Barefoot  ar- 
rested by,  125,  126. 

Pannaway,  present  name  of,  4. 

Paper  money,  130, 199  ;  movement  for, 
237,  238. 

Parker,  William,  Lord  Monteagle, 
94  n. 

Partridge,  William,  Lieutenant-Gov- 
ernor of  New  Hampshire,  157. 

Pascataqua.  name  given  to  i  art  of  col- 
onies of  both  Mason  and  Gorges,  24. 

Pascataqua  towns,  court  in,  42. 

Pacsaconaway,  Penacook  sa  hem,  138. 

Patents,  confusion  in,  24, 25  ;  monopo- 
listic nature  of,  27. 

Patten,  John,  132. 

Pauperism,  in  New  Hampshire,  327- 
330. 

Peabody,  Gen.  Nathaniel,  237. 

Peasley,  Joseph,  law  aimed  at,  44. 

Penacook  Indians,  friendliness  of,  138  ; 
later  hostility  of,  140. 

Penacook.  See  Concord,  New  Hamp- 
shire. 

Pendleton,  Bryan,  of  Watertown,  42 ; 
removal  of,  to  Portsmouth,  43  ;  part 
of,  in  destruction  of  records,  43,  44  ; 
oflSces  held  by,  43,  44  ;  Champer- 
nown's  petition  agains^t,  54. 

Penhallow,  Samuel,  testimony  of,  re- 
garding mutilated  records,  162. 

Penn,  William,  131  ;  infiuence  of  Ran- 
dolph neutralized  by,  159. 

Penny,  Henry,  102. 

Pepperrell,  Col.,  aided  by  Gov.  Went- 
worth, 177. 

Pequaket  Indians,  attack  on,  184. 

Perry,  Horatio,  311. 

Phillips,  Wendell,  quoted,  152. 

Phillips  Exeter  Academy,  242  ;  growth 
of,  323. 

Pickering,  John,  40,  43. 

Pickering,  Capt.  John,  90  ;  delegate 
to  convention  (1C90),  154;  probable 
mutilation  of  records  by,  162. 

Pierce,     Franklin,     associated    with 


350 


INDEX 


Isaac  Hill,  255  ;  career  of,  295-297  ; 
unpopularity  of,  309 ;  efforts  of,  in 
Kansas,  309  n.  ;  trustee  of  Concord 
hospital,  32(i. 

Pilgrims,  ideal  of  government  of,  9  ; 
early  aristocratic  teuUeucies  offset 
by,  28. 

Pike,  Robert,  disfranchisement  of,  45  : 
petition  in  favor  of,  45,  46  ;  reen- 
franchised,  48  ;  helps  to  free  sen- 
tenced Quakers,  48,  52 ;  Mason 
claims  recognized  by,  6G  ;  modera- 
tion of,  85 ;  testimony  of,  regarding 
Gove,  101. 

Pillsbury,  Parker,  302. 

Pilsbury,  Amos,  penitentiary  disci- 
pline introduced  by,  330. 

Piracy,  law  against,  130. 

Pitt,  William,  influence  of,  in  colonies, 
198. 

Playhouse,  remonstrance  against,  199, 
200. 

Plough,  ship,  19,  20.  See  also  Com- 
pany of  the  Plough. 

Plumer,  William,  238  ;  elected  gov- 
ernor of  New  Hampshire,  246,  249  ; 
effort  of,  to  reorganize  Dartmouth 
College,  251,  252  ;  John  Langdon 
described  by,  268 ;  Judge  Langdon 
described  by,  271-273 ;  career  of, 
275-278  ;  Weare  described  by,  281. 

Pomery,  Leonard,  67  u. 

Poor,  Gen.  231. 

Poor  Richard,  the  fight  between  Sera- 
pis  and,  215. 

Popham,  Sir  John,  Sagadahoc  colo- 
nized by,  7. 

Port  Royal,  abandoned  by  French  col- 
onists, 1609,  7. 

Portsmouth,  origin  of  name  of,  2 ; 
included  in  Strawberry  Bank  set- 
tlement, 5  ;  Mason's  plantation  at, 
16  ;  government  of  Massachusetts 
accepted  by,  22  ;  loyal  to  Church  of 
England,  22  ;  Puritan  church  at,  23  ; 
Anglican  church  at,  dissolved,  40  ; 
Bachiler  removes  to,  41  ;  represen- 
tation of,  in  Boston  General  Court, 

42  ;   Massachusetts  authority  in,  42, 

43  ;  Moodey's  church  at,  55 ;  com- 
merce of,  79 ;  an  independent  re- 
public, 116  ;  importance  of,  160  ;  re- 
monstrance against  playhouse  at, 
199,  200. 

Post-offices,  establishment  of,  in  New 

Hampshire,  220. 
Povey,  Thomas,  56. 
Preaching,    without    allowance,    law 

against,  44  ;  law  repealed,  47. 
Pring,  Martin,  voyages  of,  6,  7. 
Printers,  political  leaders  among,  254, 

255. 


Property,  Webster's  reverence  for, 
288,  293. 

Puritans,  ideal  of  government  of,  9  ; 
denounced  by  Burdet,  9  ;  restricted 
emigration  of,  13  ;  hatred  of  Laud 
for,  36,  37  ;  prejudices  of,  against 
tliose  of  different  religious  opinions, 
69,  70 ;  cause  of  certain  censm-able 
actions  of,  134. 

Quakers,  legislation  against,  48,  49-51 ; 
method  of  punishing,  52 ;  action  of 
Charles  II  regarding,  53  ;  Puritan 
injustice  toward,  62,  63  ;  attitude 
of  Charles  toward,  85 ;  tolerance 
toward,  in  New  Hampshire,  121. 

Quebec,  capture  of,  148. 

Queen  Anne's  war,  148. 

Railroad  building,  248,  249. 

Rainsford,  Judge,  88. 

Raleigh,  Sir  Walter,  1 ;  never  saw 
Virginia,  6. 

Randolph,  Bernard,  84. 

Randolph,  Edward,  appointment  of, 
to  Council,  by  James  II,  68 ;  made 
postmaster  for  New  England,  76; 
advice  of,  to  Mason,  76,  77  ;  ener- 
getic action  of,  in  New  Hampshire, 
83-80  ;  Copley's  estimate  of,  83 ; 
toleration  of,  85 ;  advice  of,  to 
King  Charles,  regarding  Massachu- 
setts, 87  ;  attack  of,  on  Massachusetts 
charter,  88  ;  returns  to  England,  89, 
92 ;  efforts  of,  against  illicit  trade, 
96  ;  account  by,  of  Gove's  rebellion, 
101-104  ;  supplants  Vaughan  in 
Council,  106  ;  turns  against  Cran- 
field,  109  ;  secretary  of  Council  for 
all  New  England,  112. 

Randolph,  John,  anecdote  of  Judge 
Livermore  and,  291  n. 

Ranger,  vessel,  215. 

Rasles,  Si5bastien,  killed,  183. 

Ratcliff,  Philip,  accusations  of,  31. 

Rawlings,  Thomas,  99. 

Rawlins,  Mrs.,  182  n. 

Rayner,  Rev.  John,  part  of,  in  Quaker 
atrocities,  52. 

Rebellion,  laws  against,  127. 

Reconstruction,  New  Hampshire's  at- 
titude toward,  312,  313. 

Religious  liberty,  provision  for,  in  New 
Hampshire  Constitution  (1783),  243, 
244. 

Republican  party,  in  New  Hampshire, 
basis  of  organization  of,  307  ;  growth 
of,  311. 

Revolution,  beginnings  of,  in  New 
Hampshire,  209-214 ;  upheld  by 
plain  people,  2.32. 

Richmau's  Island,  40. 


INDEX 


351 


Rigby,  Col.,  buys  Plough  Company's 
patent,  21. 

Rmdge,  John,  town  named  for,  207. 

Koberts,  Lieut.  Jolin,  154. 

Eobiuson,  William,  hanging  of,  50. 

Robitaille,  Philip,  Margaret  Otis  mar- 
ried to,  146. 

Roby,  Henry,  innkeeper,  124. 

Rogers,  Nathaniel  P.,  comment  of,  on 
Webster,  291  n.  ;  anecdotes  of  Judge 
Livermore  by,  291  n.  ;  "Herald  of 
Freedom  "  published  by,  302,  303. 

Rolfe,  Benjamin,  Wentworth  claims 
contested  by,  178  ;  defendant  in 
Concord  case,  190. 

Rome,  Church  of,  Stuart  return  to,  8. 

Royall,  Col.  Isaac,  attempt  to  replace 
Wentworth  bj',  173. 

Rumford.     See  Concord. 

Rye,  included  in  Strawberry  Bank 
settlement,  5. 

Sabbath-breaking,  punishment  for, 
123. 

Sagadahoc,  colony  at,  7. 

Salnt-Castiu,  Baron  de,  ammunition 
supplied  to  Indians  by,  141  ;  plun- 
dered by  Andros,  142;  grandson  of, 
killed,  183. 

Saltonstall,  Sir  Richard,  34. 

Samborne,  John,  45. 

Saratoga,  Col.  Cilley  at,  227. 

Savage,  James,  1G5  n. 

Savile,  George,  Marquis  of  Halifax,  in- 
fluence of,  105,  lOG  ;  argues  for  lib- 
erty in  New  England,  107  ;  Cranfield 
rebuked  by,  108. 

Say,  Lord,  34. 

Scammell,  Col.  Alexander,  231 ;  Thorn- 
ton's verses  on,  233  n. 

Scotch-Irish,  parts  of  New  Hampshire 
settled  by,  177,  179. 

Scotland,  refugees  from,  in  New 
Hampshire,  177. 

Scott,  Sir  Walter,  quoted,  1.50. 

Serapis,  fight  between  the  Poor  Rich- 
ard and,  215. 

Shapleigh,  Nicholas,  made  attorney 
for  Robert  Mason,  58,  C5  ;  laud 
leased  by,  60  ;  chargps  of  Littlebury 
against,  66,  67  ;  friendliness  of,  to 
Quakers,  122  ;  treaty  of,  with  In- 
dians, 140. 

Sheafe,  James,  defeated  for  governor 
of  New  Hampshire,  247,  249. 

Sherburne,  Henry,  40,  43. 

Sherburne,  Samuel,  innkeeper,  124, 
154. 

Sherwill,  Nicholas,  67  n. 

Ship-money,  129. 

Shirley,  John  M.,  116,  117. 

Shirley,  Thomas,  132. 


Shirley,  William,  made  governor  of 
MassachuKetts,  172. 

Slavery,  in  New  Hampshire,  248  n., 
300,  301  ;  Webster's  attitude  to- 
ward, 294  ;  universal  abolition  of, 
313. 

Sleeper,  John,  99. 

Smith,  Edward,  99. 

Smith,  Judge  Jeremiah,  of  Exeter, 
117  ;  contests  of,  with  Langdou,  for 
governorship,  246. 

Smith,  John,  of  the  Company  of  the 
Plough,  18. 

Smith,  Capt.  John,  explorations  of, 
6,7. 

South  Berwick,  originally  Newichwan- 
nock,  10. 

Spain,  trade  with,  129. 

Squaudo,  treaty  with,  140. 

Stanton,  Frederick  P.,  acting  governor 
of  Kansas,  310. 

Stauyan,  Anthony,  91. 

Stark,  John,  193 ;  talents  of,  148 ; 
regiment  under  command  of,  213  ; 
at  Bimker  Hill,  214  ;  Burgoyne  de- 
feated by,  21G,  22G;  at  Trenton, 
225 ;  resignation  of,  225  ;  made 
brigadier,  227  ;  attitude  of,  in  Ver- 
mont case,  234,  235  ;  Cincinnati  op- 
posed by,  236  ;  career  of,  260-262. 

Steele,  Gov.  John  H.,  views  of,  on 
corporations,  333. 

Stepheiisou,  Marmaduke,  hanging  of, 
50. 

Stevens,  Benjamin,  grant  to,  184. 

Stileman,  Elias,  Champernown's  peti- 
tion against,  53 ;  member  of  first 
royal  Council  of  New  Hampshire, 
90  ;  deposed  as  councilor,  97. 

Stiles,  Ezra.  2G4,  265. 

Story,  Augustine,  165  n. 

Story,  William,  58. 

Stoughton,  William,  85. 

Stratliam,  Wiggin's  patent  for,  32. 

Strawberry  Bank,  settlement  at,  6  ; 
destroyed  rficords  of,  43,  44  ;  name 
of,  changed  to  Portsmouth,  44.  See 
also  Portsmouth. 

Sullivan,  James,  governor  of  Massa- 
chusetts, 179. 

Sullivan,  John  (Owen  O'Sullivan), 
landing  of,  in  Newburyport,  179  ; 
polyglot  letter  of,  ISO ;  private 
school  of,  in  Berwick,  180  ;  por- 
trayal of,  by  Miss  Jewett,  181  n. 

Sullivan,  John,  governor  of  New 
Hampshire,  179  ;  revolutionary  sym- 
pathies of,  209  ;  delegate  to  Conti- 
nental Congress,  210  ;  fort  seized  by, 
211;  inai'e  briga<lier,  214;  success 
of,  in  southern  New  York,  215  ;  at 
Trenton,  225  ;  Vermont  compromise 


352 


INDEX 


accepted    by,    235 ;    Biiggestion  of, 

regarding    finance     uiiiii;>ter,    235 ; 

insurrection    (ITSIJ)  suppressed  by, 

238  ;  career  of,  2U2,  203. 
Sullivan,  Judge  Joliu,   Gen.   Sullivan 

described  by,  263. 
Siinuuer  property,  335. 
Summer  travel,  315. 
Sumner,  Charles,    insult  to,  resented 

in  New  Hampshire,  312. 
Svvett,  Capt.,  killed  by  Indians,  IW. 
S.vett,  Dr.  Giles,  50. 
Switzerland,  analogies  between  New 

Hampshire  and,  l'J2. 

Tariff,  imposed  on  New  Hampshire 
colonists,  14,  15 ;  early,  on  liquors, 
125. 

Taverns,  early  useB  of,  124. 

Taxation,  regulation  of,  129. 

Taylor,  Edward,  killed  by  Indians, 
1S2  n. 

Texas,  Hale's  vote  against  annexation 
of,  304. 

Theft,  commonness  of,  130. 

Thing,  Jonathan,  154. 

Thompson,  Benjamin,  Count  Rum- 
ford,  207  ;  value  of  discoveries  of, 
260. 

Thompson,  Ebenezer,  colonial  secre- 
tary, 217. 

Tliompson,  George,  mobbed,  302. 

Thompson's  Island,  Boston  Harbor, 
origin  of  name  of,  4. 

Thomson,  David,  land  granted  to,  4 ; 
partnership  of,  with  Mason  and 
Gorges,  5;  settlement  by,  '8;  rela- 
tions of,  with  Mason,  67  n. ;  Mr. 
Deane's  researches  concerning,  74  u. 

Thomson's  Point,  8. 

Thornton,  Matthew,  president  of 
fourth  Provincial  Congress,  212  ; 
account  of  inoculation  for  smallpox, 
228  n.  ;  letter  of,  regarding  Vermont 
case,  233. 

"  Thorough,"  policy  of,  .39. 

Tippin,  Bartholomew,  91. 

Toleration,  reUgious,  in  New  Hamp- 
shire, 121,  122. 

Toleration  Act,  254. 

Tompkins,  Mary,  sentence  against, 
51. 

Torrey,  William,  46. 

Town  government,  establishment  of, 
in  New  Hampshire,  220. 

Townships,  system  of,  originated  in 
New  Hampshire,  117. 

Treason,  only  trial  for,  ever  held  in 
New  Hampshire,  100  n.;  lawsagainst, 
127. 

Trelawney,  Mr.,  owner  of  Richmau's 
Island,  40. 


Trollope,  Anthony,  comment  of,  on 
White  Mountains  scenery,  315. 

Tuck,  Amos,  Hale  supported  by,  305  ; 
elected  to  Congress,  305. 

Tucke,  Robert,  innkeeper,  124. 

Tufton,  Robert.     See  Mason,  Robert. 

Turner,  Mrs.,  130,  131. 

Turner,  Dr.  William,  56. 

Tuttle,  Lieut.  John,  154. 

Tyng,  Jonathan,  appointment  of,  to 
Council,  by  James  II,  08. 

Underbill,  Capt.  John,  30. 

Usher,  Hezekiah,  mines  leased  to,  by 
Mason,  114. 

Usher,  James,  appointment  of,  to 
Council,  by  James  II,  68. 

Usher,  John,  made  lieutenant-gov- 
ernor of  New  Hampshire,  156 ;  op- 
position to,  157. 

Valley  Forge,  Cilley'a  regiment  at, 
227. 

Vaughan,  George,  forged  signature  of, 
44. 

Vaughan,  George,  lieutenant-governor 
of  New  Hampsliire,  160. 

Vaughan,  Major  William,  charges  of, 
against  Mason,  80,  81  ;  deposed 
from  Council,  106  ;  member  of  con- 
stitutional convention  (1090),  154; 
possible  mutilation  of  records  by, 
102. 

Vaughan,  William,  grandson  of  above, 
plan  of,  for  attack  on  Louisbourg, 
177  ;  part  of,  at  Louisbourg,  193. 

Vermont,  early  inclusion  of,  in  New 
Hampshire,  175;  jurisdiction  of  New 
York  over,  176  ;  town  charters 
granted  by  Wentworth  in,  178  ;  claim 
of  New  York  to,  confirmed,  202; 
claimed  by  New  Hampshire,  215, 
232-234 ;  attitude  of,  in  Revolution, 
232  ;  compromise  accepted  bj',  234. 

Villieu,  Indian  method  of  warfare  de- 
scribed by,  182  n. 

Virginia,  early  aristocratic  tendency 
in,  28. 

Wadleig:h,  Robert,  154. 

Wainwxight,  John,  185. 

Waldron,  Richard,  22,  43  ;  cruelty  of, 
toward  Quakers,  48, 50,  51  ;  member 
of  first  royal  Council  of  New  Hamp- 
shire, 90,  94 ;  sentence  passed  by, 
on  Edward  Gove,  100 ;  made  com- 
mander-in-chief of  soldiers,  114; 
murdered  by  Indians,  114,  142,  143  ; 
Indian  accusations  against,  137 ; 
treachery  of,  toward  Indians,  139 ; 
member  of  constitutional  conven- 
tion (1690),  154. 


INDEX 


353 


Waldron,  Richard,  Jr.,  91 ;  deputy 
register  of  Province  of  New  Hamp- 
shire, 113 ;  warned  of  Indian  at- 
tack, 145,  146 ;  victory  of,  over 
Allen,  in  land  suits,  168. 

Waldron,  Richard,  3d,  head  of  Belcher 
faction  in  New  Hampshire,  167. 

Waldron,  T.  W.,  Wentworth's  letter 
to,  J.n. 

Walford,  Jane,  tried  as  witch,  120; 
recovery  of  damages  by,  120. 

Walker,  Mr.,  trustee  of  Concord  in- 
sane hospiti',  324. 

Walker,  J.  B>jl90u. 

Walker,  Robs't  J.,  governor  of  Kan- 
sas, 310. 

Walker,  Rev. '' Timothy,  Wentworth 
claims  contested  by,  178  ;  settled  at 
Penacook,  IS.'- ;  sent  to  England,  to 
plead  Concord  case,  189,  I'JO;  on 
committee  to  draft  New  Hampsliire 
declaration  of  independence,  218. 

Walpole,  Indian  attack  on,  196. 

Wampanoag  Indians,  hostility  of,  140. 

Wannerton,  Thomas,  4;  residence  of, 
16. 

Ward,  Gen.  Artemas,  213. 

Warren,  Grizel,  captured  by  Indians, 
146. 

Warren,  Sir  WiUiam,  48  n. 

Washington,  George,  105  n. ;  confidence 
of,  in  New  Hampshire  men,  230, 231  ; 
part  of,  in  settling  Vermont  bound- 
ary, 234  ;  withdrawal  of,  from  the 
Cincinnati,  236. 

Wealth,  concentration  of,  334. 

Weare,  Mason  Tappan,  regiment  raised 
by,  310. 

Weare,  Col.  Meshech,  delegate  to  con- 
gress at  Albany,  210;  chairman  of 
Committee  of  Saiety,  211 ;  Vermont 
compromise  accepted  by,  235 ;  presi- 
dent of  Committee  of  Safety,  220, 
221  ;  career  of,  278-283 ;  house  of, 
282  n. 

Weare,  Nathaniel,  99,  102 ;  petition 
against  Cranfield  presented  by,  107  ; 
objects  to  union  with  Massachusetts, 
153  ;  member  of  constitutional  con- 
vention (1690),  154  ;  made  member 
of  royal  Council,  156. 

Weare,  Nathaniel,  son  of  Meshech, 
282  n. 

Weare,  Samuel,  2S2  n. 

Webster,  Capt.,230,  231;  defends  con- 
stitution (1787),  239. 

Webster,  Daniel,  174  ;  chosen  to  Con- 
gress, 247  ;  feeling  against,  in  New 
Hampshire,  253;  opinion  of  Madison 
held  by,  270 ;  ancestors  of,  284  ;  com- 
ment of  Carlyle  on,  285  ;  career  of, 
286-295. 


Webster,  Capt.  Ebenezer,  285;  debt  of, 
to  Langdon,  2.S6  n. 

Weeks,  Major  William,  103  n. 

Wells,  Maine,  Wheelwright's  colony 
in,  22  ;  Wheelwright's  removal  to, 
41. 

Wentworth,  Benning,  1G7,  168;  made 
governor  of  New  Hampshire,  171  ; 
claims  of,  against  Spain,  172  ;  new 
towns  granted  by,  173,  178  ;  attempt 
to  oust,  173  ;  Pepperrell  aided  by, 
177  ;  contests  over  grants  of,  178  ; 
unpopularity  of,  194  ;  characteris- 
tics of,  194  ;  second  marriage  of, 
194,  195;  allowed  to  resign,  202. 

Wentworth,  Frances,  205. 

Wentworth,  John,  lieutenant-governor 
of  New  Hampshire,  160  ;  grants 
claimed  by,  167;  anger  of,  over 
Massachusetts  grant  of  Concord,  187. 

Wentworth,  Sir  John,  appointed  gov- 
ernor of  New  Hampshire,  202  ;  also 
Surveyor  of  the  King's  Woods,  202  ; 
estate  of,  in  Wolfeborough,  203, 
207  ;  charges  of  Peter  Livius  against, 

205  ;  counties  named  for  friends  of, 

206  ;  popularity  of,  209  ;  opposition 
of,  to  Continental  Congress,  211 ; 
letter  of  remonstrance  to,  from 
Provincial  Congress,  212  ;  takes  ref- 
uge at  New  Castle,  213. 

Wentworth,  John,  of  Somersworth, 
212. 

Wentworth,  Mark  Hunkmg,  205, 207  n. 

Wentworth,  Michael,  195  n. 

Wentworth,  Samuel,  innkeeper,  124; 
small  share  of,  in  Mason  dispute, 
159. 

Wentworth,  William,  165  n. 

West,  Benjamin,  275. 

Whale,  ship,  20. 

Wharton,  Edward,  122. 

Wheelock,  Dr.  Eleazar,  assisted  in 
founding  of  Dartmouth  College,  207. 

Wheelock,  John,  removed  from  presi- 
dency of  Dartmouth  College,  251. 

Wheelwright,  Esther,  147  n. 

Wheelwright  Rev.  John,  22 ;  migra- 
tions of,  41,  42  ;  Indian  deed  to, 
163,  164. 

Whipple,  T.  J.,  regiment  raised  by, 
310,  311. 

White,  Thomas,  165  n. 

White  Mountains,  gradual  approaches 
made  to,  203  ;  revenue  from  summer 
travel  to,  315. 

Whiting,  William,  34. 

Whittier,  John  Greenleaf,  mobbing  of, 
302  ;  satirical  poem  of,  303  n. ;  lines 
of,  on  anti-slavery  victory  in  New 
Hampshire,  306;  on  Charles  Ather- 
ton,  306  n. 


354 


INDEX 


Wiggin,  Sarah,  Puritan  domination 
resisted  by,  51  n. 

Wiggin,  Capt.  Thomas,  deposed  at 
Dover,  9;  patents  of,  sustained,  25  ; 
defense  of  Bostouians  by,  32  ;  juris- 
diction of  Massachusetts  asked  by, 
32,  33  ;  later  share  of,  in  Boston 
oligarchy,  33 ;  forged  signature  of, 
44;  instrument  of  the  Bostonians,  47; 
Barefoot  and  Mason  maltreated  by, 
110. 

Wiggin,  Thomas,  Jr.,  72  ;  helps  free 
Quakers,  52. 

William  III,  New  Hampshire  contin- 
ued as  royal  province  by,  77,  78  ; 
theory  of  colonial  government  of, 
156. 

Williams,  Francis,  40. 

WiUiams,  Roger,  38. 

Willoughby,  Lord,  56. 

Wilson,  Henry,  candidate  for  Vice- 
President,  312. 

Wingate,  Rev.  Paine,  211,  264,  267. 

Winslow,  Admiral,  311. 

Winslow,  Edward,  37  ;  letter  of  Sir 
John  Wentworth  to,  208  n. 

Winslow,  Josiah,  85. 

Winthrop,  Mr.,  librarian  of  Harvard, 
265  n. 

Winthrop,  Governor  John,  quotation 


from,  regarding  Mason,  12  ;  state- 
ment of,  regarding  the  Company  of 
the  Plough,  19,  20  ;  methods  of,  30  ; 
defended  by  Wiggin,  32;  opinion  of, 
regarding  Massachusetts  jurisdic- 
tion in  New  Hampshire,  32,  33; 
statements  of,  regarding  opening  of 
letters,  33,  34;  enmity  toward,  in 
England,  35. 

Winthrop,  John,  the  younger,  aids  in 
laying  out  Hampton,  35,  117. 

Winthrop,  Steven,  42. 

Wiswall,  John,  quoted,  134. 

Witchcraft,  laws  agaijt^t,  10  ;  alleged 
cases  of,  120,  121. 

Wolfeborough,  Went-'Orth  estate  at, 
203,  207.  >■' 

Wonolancet,  Penacook  sachem,  138. 

Woodbury,  Levi,  address  of,  on  pros- 
perity of  New  Hampshire,  248  ; 
chosen  to  Senate,  251;  offices  held 
by,  255. 

Woodman,  Capt.  John,  154. 

Wood-pulp  industry,  334,  335. 

"  Worshipful "  —  common  term  ol  ad- 
dress, 152. 

Wyllis,  George,  34. 

Wyre,  Justice.  See  Weare. 

Yarmouth  attempt  at  colonizing  21. 


Electrotyl'ed  and  printed  by  H .  O.  Houghton  <&•  Co. 
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something  much  more  and  very  much  better  than  that. 
They  embody  what  is  most  distinct  and  peculiar  in  the 
political  life  and  history  of  each  State,  and  show  how  that 
has  contributed  to  the  development  of  the  whole.  The 
widespread  interest  awakened  in  the  past  of  our  nation  will 
find  much  to  satisfy  it  in  these  volumes,  for  the  design  is 
original  and  the  execution  excellent." 

The  latest  volume  in  the  Commonwealths  Series 
NEW  HAMPSHIRE 

By  Frank  B.  Sanborn.  With  map.  i6mo,  $i.io,  net. 
Postage,  lo  cents. 

This  volume  in  the  Commonwealths  Series  covers  more 
than  three  centuries  of  the  history  of  New  Hampshire,  be- 
ginning with  the  voyages  of  Gosnold  and  Pring,  and  closing 
with  the  amended  State  Constitution  of  1903.  Its  histori- 
cal research  is  chiefly  expended  on  the  two  centuries  from 
1623,  when  the  early  settlements  were  planted  by  John 
Mason  and  Fernando  Gorges,  to  1788,  when  the  Constitu- 
tion was  ratified  at  Concord.     The  later  history  is  too  well 


kri  I       I    'iL.c  I  rc       :   'i,  Lm       .liiib  a  ciaiacteriza- 

Uoa  oi  tne  notable  men  of  New  Hampshire,  Stark,  Sullivan, 
the  Weares,  the  Langdons,  Plumer  and  Webster. 

The  historian  has  drawn  freely  upon  documents  dis- 
covered in  the  past  fifty  years  which  throw  much  light  upon 
the  early  story  of  land  grants,  land  tenure,  and  the  conflict 
in  New  Hampshire  with  aristocratic  types  of  government. 


Vcumes  in  the  Commonwealths  Series  already  Published 


VIRGINIA  {/Revised  Edition)  By  John  Esten  Cooke 
OREGON  By  William  Barrows 

MARYLAND  {Revised  Edition) 

By  William  Hand  Browne 
KENTUCKY  By  Nathaniel  S.  Shaler 

MICHIGAN  By  Thomas  M.  Cooley 

KANSAS  By  Leverett  W.  Spring 

CALIFORNIA  By  Josiah  Royce 

NEW  YORK.  2  vols.  {J?ev.  Ed.)  By  Ellis  H.  Roberts 
CONNECTICUT  {Hev.  Ed.)  By  Alexander  Johnston 
MISSOURI  By  Lucien  Carr 

INDIANA  By  J.  P.  Dunn,  Jr. 

OWIO  {Revised Edition)  By  RuFUS  King 

VERMONT  By  Rowland  E.  Robinson 

Each  of  the  above  with  map,  i6mo,  gilt  top,  $i.2J. 
TEXAS  By  George  P.  Garrison 

NEW  HAMPSHIRE  By  Frank  B.  Sanborn 

Each  of  the  above  with  map,  $i.io,  net.    Postage,  lo  cents. 

Volumes  in  the  Co?nmonwealths  Series  now  in  Preparation 


NEW  JERSEY  By  Pres.  Austin  Scott 

ILLINOIS  By  Pres.  John  H.  Finley 

PENNSYLVANIA  By  Talcott  Williams 

WISCONSIN  By  Reuben  G.  Thwaites 

LOUISIANA  By  Albert  Phelps 
MINNESOTA                   By  Dr.  William  F.  Folwell 

IOWA  By  Dr.  Albert  Shaw 


HOUGHTON,  MIFFLIN  AND  COMPANY 
BOSTON  AND  NEW  YORK 


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